Series A
by cruces
Summary: Collection of self-contained oneshots/scenes (each 'chapter' is a different story). MCU all-inclusive, AU-heavy and features some crossovers. K to M.
1. 1 thor is a barista (just because)

series a

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thor is a barista (just because)

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No one knew what the guy really did for a living, but it was something that allowed him to spend the entire day, every day at the neighborhood coffeeshop, harassing the baristas, drinking too many double espressos, and conducting rapid-fire instant message conversations with persons unknown whose names started with the letters P and R, which Thor and the rest of the staff agreed, Tony Stark was absolute balls at.

The previous Wednesday, from one of the coffeeshop's other regulars, Clint Barton, who was either a) an international man of mystery or b) an out-of-work architect going by the blueprints stuffed into his beat-up briefcase, Thor had learned that Tony Stark was possibly the head honcho of a company that made FDA approval-pending energy drinks that combined yerba mate, aged wild ginseng, and a secret ingredient extra-judiciously obtained from Canopus. The shop's resident Russian novelist, who went by no name and was rumored to have killed a man in Reno who had dared to ask, said that Tony Stark had cornered the world market in automotive decals by the age of fifteen and was a useless layabout whose access to free Wi-Fi should be revoked by U.N. decree.

He seemed to spend most of his waking hours at the shop, and the navy comfy chair in the corner permanently bore the shape of his posterior, but Thor didn't much care one way or the other; Tony Stark never spilled any of his double espressos, always left a tip in the tip jar at the end of the day, and had great taste in music, which everyone knew because he often pointed out how particular chords from the easy listening played in the shop had been deployed to superior effect in various rock 'n' roll hits from the eighties. Being the non-judgmental type, head barista Thor considered the quips free lessons in popular American music. Like many New Yorkers, he wasn't from around. But in an example of the stars aligning just right even when they shone above a run-down independent coffee dispensary, Thor was a natural when it came to swimming in foreign waters. He was the only employee at the shop who enjoyed Tony's wit without irony; he reminded him of someone.

Although some days Thor did the closing-up, especially when the latest college hire flaked out on a shift, and saw with his own eyes Tony wandering down the street at the end of the day, sometimes he still wasn't quite sure if Tony ever really left. He was a constant fixture in the coffeeshop. It had its other regulars: the aforementioned novelist, whose red hair was as counterfeit as her accent but who was known to down vodka in such a way that no one quite felt certain enough to take her to task, dead men's tales notwithstanding; a duo Tony nicknamed the assassin and the saint who usually came in around 6 am, three bleary eyes between them, and always paid with exact change out of the saint's Gucci pocketbook — she was assistant to the one-eyed man, that much was clear, but Thor thought that they really should have been designated thusly: assassin one and assassin two.

"Ice coffee, black," the Russian novelist told Thor. Today she was wearing trainers, black yoga pants, a worn gray hoodie over a plain white T-shirt, and a trucker's cap that said "Vegas: Go Flush Or Go Home" in a peculiar shade of dragonsblood. Her writerly kit, plain notebooks and eraserless pencils wrapped up in a leather knife roll, was tucked under one arm. The mid-morning lull hung over the shop, and she seemed loath to jostle it; her instincts kicked in regardless of her feelings and she stole a glance at the corner. "Who?"

Thor shrugged as he scooped ice into a tall glass. "Friend?"

"No," the Russian novelist said, drawing out the syllable and pitching it so that it was saturated entirely in disbelief. Thor poured the coffee and rang it up, and the Russian novelist picked out a straw from the basket on the counter's far end as though she were drawing a lot. She was too much of a professional to let a suspicious look pass over her face, but drink in hand, stared for a split second too long as she walked past the navy chair and its occupant. She tossed a look at Clint, sitting at the old chenille couch opposite the chair and poring over what looked like a subway map from the forties, before taking a seat at a table in the back and taking out her tools. Tony looked up from his laptop and smiled at the same time that his fingers tapped out a string of smiley faces, and on the other side of the river a Colonel typed at him to get back to work.

"This is my partner in crime, Dr. Bruce Banner," he announced, introducing the man in the crumpled gray linen suit to the rest of the shop's patrons, who included a couple of lost but brave tourists and a teller from the bank around the corner nursing an espresso along with a hangover. Only Clint looked up. "What kind of doctor?"

"Business associate," Bruce Banner said. His hands fluttered, outlining a Schrodinger's cat. "Philosophy."

"Last week it was forensic psychology," Tony recalled.

"Was it?" Bruce said, looking vague. "You must be misremembering."

"Bruce's maiden name is actually Moriarty," Tony said, and wagged a finger at Clint. "In case you were thinking of committing any dastardly deeds. Bruce has probably already got it covered."

"You're the dastard," Clint said in reply, an exemplar of maturity. "Of course I'm not planning a heist. Ha ha." He shoveled his belongings — laid out on the table like so: an antique compass, two brand-new paperclips, three plastic film canisters that rattled, and the crumpled map — into his briefcase and made a beeline for the door without even saying goodbye.

"Strange guy," Bruce said.

"The circus dropped him off one day," Tony told him.

"Really?"

"Stop impugning the Hawk's honor," Thor sternly said from the counter.

"There is nothing dishonorable about being from the circus, Thor, for shame," Tony said. Thor snapped his dishtowel at him and went back to wiping down the glass pastry case next to the register.

Bruce crossed his arms. "Hawk, eh..."

"What, was he one of your nemeses?" Tony asked, chagrined to have missed such a crucial piece of intel. At Thor's look of concern, Bruce said, "I have ex-colleagues, not enemies. Must have mistaken him with someone else." It was and old joke of Tony's, and a bad one at that, but Bruce Banner did share a trait with a certain mastermind: there was only ever the one nemesis, though Bruce's situation could have been summed up just as easily with reference to tame jackals and hides worn raw, inside out.

Tony made a sound at the back of his throat. "Roses by any other name—"

"Are your friends," Bruce said meaningfully. The meaning flew over Thor's head, but his ability to read people was world-class and his intuition gold, his blind spot within the bounds of that permitted to mortal men, and in another universe, even those beyond; Thor was the main reason why the tip jar never went begging. He made his way over with a complimentary plate of vanilla scone, since this was Bruce's first time at the coffeeshop and he knew Tony. Clint would have called it reconnaissance, but less suspicious people called it being friendly.

"Good guy, you know," Thor said, smiling nicely. He set the plate down on the low worn table and handed Bruce a paper napkin. "Somebody worth having at your back. Not that anyone will be having battles in this establishment."

Both Bruce and Tony nodded. Thor would probably flatten anyone who tried to disturb the coffeeshop and then serve the poor sap a latte while waiting for the cops to show up. Bruce split the scone in two and Tony ordered a couple of espressos to go along with the pastry. Thor delivered the coffees straightaway, helped the tourists chart a way back towards Broadway, and went to check to see if the other barista on duty needed any help with the roasting. Hogun, one of Thor's flatmates, came by around a quarter past eleven, narrowly beating the lunch rush, to grab an Americano between deliveries, and toward the end of the rush S– texted him to say that the kitchen sink had exploded and that it was F–'s fault for trying to impress the girl he had picked up the night before by means of breakfast, damn his evercurling mustache. Thor texted back to say that one and half hours past noon was technically not breakfast, and two minutes later V– texted him to say that there was no need to worry and that everything was taken care of and if Thor should see something about a homicide in the evening news on the coffeehouse telly, well, he should promptly switch the channel, what a horrible violent world this was, good gravy. Thor made plans to stay over at his girlfriend's.

That day, the tiny flatscreen, hung up on the exposed brick wall across from the pastry case, was currently beaming into the quiet shop the pearly smiles of the hosts of the shopping network upon one Tony's Stark's request. Something about "work." The other barista on duty was of the opinion that it had to do with manipulating the world silver market. Thor recalled what Clint had said just before taking off for his break, and was surprised to see him back on the couch when he returned. He was usually in only once a week. Next to Clint was Steve, waving his brushpen in the air to illustrate a point. Thor suddenly remembered: it was Thursday. Steve's fingers and wrists were the most solid-looking part of him; came from all that drawing, Thor guessed as he took up his place in front of the register again. Clint was listening intently; sitting on the arm of the couch on his other side, Tony was frowning and trying to get a word in; ensconced in the armchair, Bruce was taking a nap. Sometime during the exchange the Russian novelist had scooted her table and chair closer to the couch.

Thor wandered over with a clean rag and a spray bottle. Camouflage. Clint gave him a discreet thumbs-up.

"Would be nobody there to notice even," Steve said. He set the pen down with a flourish next to his cup of joe. Clint looked unconvinced. He dropped a paperclip on the coffee table, picked it up, and then bounced it again. "Maybe that would work if you had a backup, but I'm talking solo flyby here."

"You said guys like clockwork, right? No easier pattern than regular to disrupt."

"Turns into a timing problem," Clint said.

"A _synchronizing_ problem. Shit, you could handle it blindfolded. It's only, whatchamacallit, some chirality dodge. Basically it's a funhouse mirruh," Steve said around a mouthful of croissant. Clint voiced another point of logistics and Steve brought out his sketchbook to lay out for him a schematic.

It was odd that sometimes Steve Rogers sounded like a drill sergeant, because he was actually an illustrator. He might have become a star soldier if fate had dealt him a different hand, though it ought to be said of that whole deck, it was uncommonly hard. Unbeknownst to anyone at the shop, Steve's career as a professional in the creative arts had started from odd jobs as an artist's model. It had been just a way to make some easy cash when he was younger and everything desperately sad and gray, but he'd had the misfortune of catching the drawing bug and had long ago coasted past the point of no return. His hands were always stained with ink and he tended to squint from having stared at a Cintiq without a break for years, but he was extraordinarily handsome every morning for exactly twenty-five minutes before he parked himself in front of his computer screen, hunched over, to check his email and post a morning doodle to his portfolio/blog.

He came in to sketch on Thursday afternoons because that was when the shop had the perfect mix of people and empty chairs and Tuesday evenings because that was when they had a special on cinnamon scones. Every first Saturday of the month, he put together a raggle-tag sketch group, the only time Tony gave up his chair, since close proximity to the scratching of their pencils and pens on paper did unfortunate things to his ability to write outlandish product descriptions for his auction listings. Maybe because of that, Steve and Tony didn't get along.

"That way won't work for nothing," Steve was saying.

"Captain Obvious here has a point," Tony said, inviting himself to the conversation.

Captain Obvious bristled visibly. The change was impressive; it added at least fifty pounds to his frame in the blink of an eye. His Brooklyn accent grew more pronounced. "That's right, I do."

"No need to argue over hypotheticals," Clint said loudly. Thor took the opportunity to ask Steve about his recent slate of projects, which earned him an invisible thumbs up from Clint and a credit rating downgrade from Tony, working out to Thor thinking that they were both hilarious. Ordinary Steve brushed the crumbs from his fingers on the edge of his jacket. "I know a guy who knows the guy who's the barber to the editor's nephew. You're looking at the guy who might be the new penciler for _The Retaliators_."

"That is the worst title," Clint commented. "Sounds like it should be_ The Realtors_."

Tony solemnly shook his head. "No no no, _The Reprisers_. Like an a cappella group."

"_The Revengers_," the Russian novelist said. The guys all just shook their heads and she snorted and went back to scribbling in her notebook.

"Anyway, we'll see," Steve said, confident and diffident all at once. Thor was charmed; Tony was still trying to figure out how he'd managed that trick earlier. At some point he was bound to discover that it was no trick, but unfortunately the day of discovery lay distant on the horizon; for the moment it sufficed Tony to lure Steve into a discussion about online marketing strategies and spam filters with a side trip into fractals, something they both agreed on was a pain in the ass. They jumped when Bruce kicked the table in his sleep.

"It's today!" Bruce said, waking up with an undignified sound. He stared at the people staring at him and rubbed a hand over his face. "Sorry. What's today?" he asked even as he was checking his watch, a dinged-up Timex. He looked around and calmed when he saw that there was a television. "Anybody mind if I change the channel?"

"But— cubic zirconia—"

"You weren't even watching," Steve said.

"Multi-tasking!"

"I vote for new channel," the Russian novelist said, with an emphasis on the v-word.

Clint raised a hand. Steve raised his sketchbook. "Yes vote for me."

Thor shuffled over to the television and changed the channel to the one Bruce requested, and retreated behind the counter, looking glum. A harrowed expression crossed Bruce's face. "Oh. If you don't like— "

"No, it's fine," Thor quickly said. "Just— my brother."

"Is _he_ on?" Clint asked. "He's like super famous," he informed Bruce.

"Only in Europe. And South America. And Africa and Asia. Oh, and the Middle East and probably Antarctica and definitely Australia," Tony said.

"That is why I decided to make the States my home," Thor told Clint. At Tony, he shook his head. "And we are not going to talk about that." He went back to drying a white ceramic tassé.

"You should've followed in the family tradition," Tony said, because he was a jerk, and because he was suddenly quite taken with the idea of Thor wearing modern heraldry. Something red, maybe silver. At Bruce's look of confusion Tony leaned over to whisper in his ear, and Bruce's eyebrows shot up. "They don't look alike at all," he whispered back.

"Too slow for the big leagues," Thor said. It sounded like something he had had the opportunity to say so many times that all the bitterness had leached out of the words. He looked beatifically at the espresso machine, completely at peace with the world except for the corner that held a navy comfy chair and Tony Stark. "Anyway, coffee is good."

"Well, in spite of what I said, I am glad that you decided become the God of Coffee to dispense holy elixir to us mere humans," Tony said, straightening. "You've definitely improved my life."

Too moved to say anything, Thor just stared at his hands, laid palm-down and flat on the counter surface. He was rescued from a bit of manly blubbering by the arrival of the one-eyed man, looking as though he had fought off a pack of alien mercenaries to get to the coffeeshop. His assistant was right behind, shouldering a bag that looked like a Birkin, if Hermès made one for carrying grenade launchers. It was the first time that the pair had come into the shop outside of morning hours. The assassin put his bulletproof mug on the counter and made his order. When Thor looked at the saint, she shook her head, saying, "No caffeine after five."

Tony strolled to the register with his laptop. He was terrible at it; Clint decided to give him a D minus. "Why don't you guys get along? I vote against."

Thor shrugged. "I betrayed my brother to the truth," he said.

"Some family things, never only one person's fault," the Russian novelist said.

"But the wound remains," Thor said.

"That's heavy," the assassin said, still waiting for his cappuccino. "You should be a songwriter. Want to be in a band?"

"Never even thought of it," Thor said, grabbing the neglected mug. "Just a moment." Thor pulled the espresso and heated the milk, watching how closely the bubbles crowded together, and assembled the coffee, milk, and foam together in the mug. Thor handed it back and the one-eyed man handed him a crisp bill and a business card in exchange. It read, in ultrasleek platinum-embossed sans-serif letters: Nick Fury, CEO, S.H.I.E.L.D Entertainment Ltd. On the back was a phone number in binary.

"That card self-destructs in twenty-four hours, so if you're gonna call, do it before you need to buy a new wallet."

"Bluffing," Tony said, disguising it as a cough, poorly.

"I don't do bluffing," Nick Fury said. He pointed a finger at Thor. "Twenty-four hours. Thanks for the coffee," he added, taking a sip to show that despite his natural inclination he trusted the drinks from this shop. He looked at the television, at the door, and then at his assistant, who flatly said, "Boss, this shit is heavy."

"And a decaf cappuccino for Ms. Hill, for here," Nick said. Thor took out a clean mug and saucer for the drink, and drew an oak leaf on the foam. The two went to sit at a table with a good viewing angle, and Clint waved Thor over. "It's starting. Wait, just the interviews."

"Don't be a pussy," Tony told Thor. "We missed the first half," they heard a despairing Bruce say.

Thor set his jaw and wrung the last droplets of life out of a dishrag. "I'll jinx it. He would try to kill me."

"He'd need come here to do that, wouldn't he?" Tony said. "Still voting against, just for the record," he told the others.

Thor sighed. "You don't know my brother."

"Let him storm the gates," Tony said, throwing out an arm. "And if you should fall, oh mighty Thor, we," Tony indicated the rest of the coffeeshop patrons, who were not paying him any serious attention, "shall avenge thee."

"Times like this you really sound like an old man," said Captain Doing-My-Damnedest-Not-To-Smile. This hurt Tony right in the vanity, his most delicate organ, but he wasn't about to let Steve know he had scored a point. He put on a brassy grin. "Just wait until your youthful metabolism grinds to a halt and you grow a beer gut," he said. At the barb Steve laughed a little. Slightly mollified, Tony went to sit next to Bruce as on the screen the whistle blew. A few customers trickled in and more than a few stayed to watch the match; in spite of his misgivings Thor followed the action along, an old remorse and an odd pride warring for supremacy in his middle. Still the tea and coffee flowed generously, and the pastries of course; seized up with inexpressible feelings Thor saw to it that no cup and no plate went empty. He would have liked to make something for the exhausted players on the pitch, too.

Thor's brother came up on the TV in his customary green, his face utterly still, his piercing blue eyes trained like lasers on the opposing side. He slammed his gloves together once, twice. He was terrifying.

"_Penalties_. Such bullshit," Tony said, engrossed. Tony shut up, this is the last shot, someone said, probably Clint, then the entire shop sank into silence as the striker walked towards the ball for the kick, took a deep breath and sprinted forward. Loki leapt.

Everyone screamed.

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	2. 2 fairy tale(s)

series a

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fairy tale(s)

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Once there was a young man named Thor who loved a mortal maiden. To be sure, he was mortal himself, but his people reckoned ages by the rings of the tree whose branches wound around all the worlds, and the maiden whose heart he had won only through a great suffering hailed from a land dyed in the green of spring, one that would crumble like an autumn leaf before old age would bow his head. It was bowed today, but for the death of his brother, not for the loss of his love, for he would have time more than enough to grieve her as well, near eternities. Sad singing shivered the foundations of his father's house and draped its columns in the shades of mourning. His father sat silent in this shadow and gazed at him with eyes as dark as a well; Thor's had deepened in the days since his foolish boasts and reckless misdeeds and he would have met them, squarely, had he not been so keenly aware of his fault that no amount of tears would wash away. He fled into the brightly lit halls of the house of his father where the people sighed and lamented the madness of it all: a foundling, a chanceling, had it been not? Lunacy hand-reared from the dregs of war. Now everyone knew the true parent of the dead prince, Thor's brother, their great, sworn enemy, and war, was it not? no wonder, they said, nodding, and Thor raged at them and broke their heads or would have if he had not been so changed; he could only slink past them like a dog with a broken tail. His lady mother, who was wise in many things, seeing him thus, took pity on him, kissed his brows, encircled him in her arms, and did not speak of the space her arms and his arms left empty so Thor did not, either. His boon companions clasped his arms and gave him condolences and encouragement; one of them, an unparalleled warrior, held his hands in hers. Do not despair, she said, to which he said, I feel as though I may die of grief, to which she replied, as sharp as a blade: It will dull.

"Then it will hurt more when the last of my heart's blood is drained, and I shall have deserved the pain, every single drop," Thor said.

"We grieve, too," she said. She did not think much of Thor's feeling sorry for himself, for all that she loved him as a shield-brother and better. "If grief kills Thor, then the rest of us are not long for this world."

"Of love I shall expire as well," Thor said grimly. "If one should fail the other will strike true." This was melodramatic even for an expressive and demonstrative people such as theirs, but under the circumstances his friend felt inclined to show him compassion, rather than box his ears as she had when they were children and Thor had done something particularly asinine or ill-advised, rare occasions not in the least, in the past.

"If you call upon me I will gladly die beside you, but not at the altar of love, nor grief neither. Otherwise I shall stand," she said. So do not give in, she added, squeezing his hands and rising to her feet to attend to his lady mother, for the call for the table rang out then. At the feast for his brother's passing Thor sat at his father's right, and his father did not need to say, all heard in their hearts, what he had said to his dead son last, that echoed in Thor's very soul. In the days that followed he heard his brother called traitor, and it was true, he had nearly begun and finished a war by himself, for which people also made a sign against evil, but he was dead and disgraced and his name spoken less and less, even by the rumor-mongers and rebellious children. Thor slept little if at all, and then only fitfully, but his dreams were desolation, graced by nothing but ice and rocks that cut his feet. He was still able to make himself run, but nowhere did he see a face dear to him, hear a call he would have recognized and would have answered with joy. Out of his mind, he wandered far, perhaps too far, across the waste and reached the edge of a wood. Before another dream in the dream claimed him he thought of the mortal woman he loved, whose name had twisted his brother's throat, who knew nothing of their strife except that by its violence Thor had nearly died, who lived in a place he could not reach any longer. He had destroyed the way by destroying his brother. Only by dreams it would be. Under the shade of the leaves—

Thor swam, paddling half-heartedly, but the water was unexpectedly heavy or he was too buoyant, one or the other, so that it was easier to swim through the air instead, his feet occasionally skimming the tops of the waves. The sky was the color of the sea and thick with schools of silvery fish. They obscured his view, which was why Thor found himself tripping over something lying on the surface of the water. Sitting up, the obstruction revealed itself to be a man in soldier's garb with blue eyes and blue lips and skin the color of a corpse.

"Hey watch it, buddy."

"I did not mean to disturb you," Thor said.

"You don't need to apologize. Just watch it next time."

Thor nodded. His first response had been to demand that the man, obviously a common infantryman, show him the proper respect due his rank, but that was before. "Where are we?" he asked, as the liquid waves turned into flying flurries.

"I dunno," the soldier said. "Who or what are you?"

"A prince," Thor said truthfully. The admission came out embarrassed.

"Then you are the second member of the royalty I've met today," the soldier said. He tugged at his hair and then his crumpled collar. "I wish I had worn my dress uniform."

Lightheaded with hope, Thor untangled himself and scrambled to his feet. "What did he look like? Which way did he go?"

"He's still here," the soldier said, gesturing with a thumb. Thor's head whipped around but his amnesiac hopes turned instantly to ashes when he saw that it was not his brother but a water-dweller, arms crossed. He was in bad temper, going by the deep frown on his face.

"Another one," he said, displeased.

"Have you seen perchance—" Thor began, only to be interrupted. "No," the sea-dwelling royal said.

"This guy is a jerk, don't bother," the soldier said.

"You dare!"

The soldier lay back down and turned his back to them, tucking himself into a napping position. "All right, all right." Thor heard him yawn. "We haven't seen anybody else."

"I am sorry to have disturbed your rest," Thor said. He was no deft hand at seeing far, but his father was a great sorcerer, and if he had not inherited much talent for the unseen mysteries, having grown up in his father's house, he at least knew how to recognize when he was in an otherworldly situation, and in such situations it never hurt to be polite.

There was another yawn. "It's been a long day. Right, fall in..."

When the gentle snoring began, Thor looked at the king, who appeared resigned. "There is no use trying to talk to this one," he said. "He does as he pleases, which means not leaving."

"Perhaps he has no one to wake him up," Thor suggested. "You have tried?"

"I am reduced to waiting," the king answered, disgruntled. "I will not suffer intruders in my home, but neither will I lower myself to attack a sleeping enemy. Wake up, you," he said, nudging the soldier with a bare foot. He did not stir, only mumbled something indistinct. The king sighed and looked around with another frown. "So it goes." He glared at Thor. "What do you want? I have too many ne'er-do-wells loitering in my country already," he warned.

"I'm your friend, not a ne'er-do-well," the soldier said.

"We have never met," the king insisted.

"This is a dream, where strange things may be true and true things false," Thor said diplomatically.

"Dream or not, I want this land creature gone," the king said, and then bent down to try to lift the soldier. He gave up after a short while, huffing, and cursed in his native tongue and rubbed his hands together to try to banish the cold. When the king made no further move Thor gave it a try, but the soundly sleeping soldier was heavier than a haystack of lead, and his arms like ice. He stepped back with a mutter. "Absurd."

"Just so," the king agreed. "I see that you are looking for someone."

"No," Thor replied sadly. "No one at all."

"If you help me remove this fool from my realm I will point you in the direction of someone who can help you find this person," the king declared, blithely ignoring what Thor had just said.

"Neither you nor I could lift him, and we are no mere saplings," Thor pointed out instead of setting the king to rights, because his heart felt as though it would break were he to say out loud: my brother is dead.

"If he cannot be moved, then we find someone who can," the king said. The sudden shift from 'I' to lowercase 'we' rather bothered Thor, but he said nothing definite, only hemmed and hawed. He was familiar with quests of all kinds from the stories his father used to tell, had even gone gallivanting on several during his youth, full of bluster, though never while dreaming. They were often messy affairs, or the reward too meager to show for the effort, but the experience had been reward enough when he was younger, especially in the company of his nearest and dearest. Compared to those exploits, moving a snoring soldier dressed in outlandish rags seemed like a task beneath his dignity, but then Thor caught himself thusly thinking and felt shame rising up his craw. This was the sort of thing that was _before_, when he had gone around smashing up lives, of others and his own, heedless of the suffering he caused, believing himself to be above reproach.

"Who might this person be?" Thor asked the king, who told him of a witch who lived in the sky in a house spun from gold. He pointed to how he might climb up, using one of the silken ropes that tethered the house to the earth, and Thor hauled himself up bodily up, climbing until the two figure below were mere specks, climbing until he stopped getting disgusting nosefuls of flying plankton, climbing until he cleared the clouds, climbing until round metal birds, lights in their feathers aglow, drifted slowly past. Beyond them floated a golden castle—

The throne room he found empty, except for a corner heaped with insect husks. Thor ducked his head to keep it from catching on the webs, and descended the steps. Bodies crunched underfoot and threw up fine particles of bronze, dusting clearly the outline of eight long limbs and lashes woven around eight bright eyes.

Well met, the witch said. She was sharpening two pairs of knives that went clack, clack, clack. Thor explained his purpose there, and the witch cut out a rectangle in the soft dirt beneath the web's gray awning, fixed the corners with the point of each blade. He will need to be kissed, the witch said, and Thor said that he was already promised to another, and it seemed uncivil to turn around and ask the king when he had been the one entrusted by him with the matter, and the witch let out a chuckle.

"By someone from his past," she explained. "I know just the person, but before I tell you, I require a favor."

"Name it," Thor said, though he was beginning to understand why the king of the sea had been so cross, it did not do to live in dreams and tales after all, everything took three times as long, "and I shall consider your request."

The witch directed his attention to the map on the floor, a piece of bark as delicate as a pinned moth. She told him that a dragon had taken up residence there and that she needed him rid. Thor inquired whether she needed a token or proof, and the witch simply climbed up his arm and across his shoulder and over the shell of his ear to sit cross-legged upon the crown of his head.

"My eyes will be proof," she said, and bore the negligible weight of a spider, and so they set off into the land in the map, creased with rushing streams of ink, wrinkled with prairie, and dotted with hills. The dragon dwells in a cave behind that hill, the witch said, but when Thor climbed down the other side the cave was an upturned gourd, and the hillock really a heap of sand.

"And the fearsome beast?" Thor asked, inwardly laughing in spite of his best intentions to have become a new, mindful man. The witch climbed down onto his nose to glare at the spot right between his eyes, and then parachuted down onto the ground. Thor crouched down to better see her and the small green lizard curled up in the shade of the hollow gourd.

"This is no place for a dragon," the witch said. "The castle will suit you better."

The dragon said: No castle. Like cave.

"I will give you a maiden to devour," the witch wheedled. Thor scowled at this, but the dragon said: No maiden. Princess.

"Princess!" the witch said. She looked at Thor, who was just then not in the least bit sorry that he had not been born a princess, and back. The lizard did not budge; the spider started weaving for him enticing, juicy tableaus. Thor listened to them haggle for a while, but the amusement wore off quickly; his mind wandered and then his feet, and for the second time he found himself crashing to the ground, snarled up in someone else's arms and legs. A thin, bespectacled man who had been walking next to the knight Thor had walked into helped them extricate themselves and then stood back.

"Hey you big lug, watch it," the knight said. He got to the rest of his feet with a clanking of metal. "Have you seen a dragon around?"

Because he was sure he would start laughing otherwise and because he did not want to cause any more offense, Thor queried, "Why are you looking for a dragon?"

The knight looked at him as if he were daft and tapped his breastplate with the knuckles of a mailed hand, whereupon a clasp on the burnished cuirass dangled off. The scholar came to help the knight hook the end of it back on. What was strange to Thor, though, was that the knight carried no weapons.

"We heard of a great dragon terrorizing this region," the scholar told Thor.

"We're heroes," the knight said. After a pause, he said, "This guy is, anyway."

"Not so," the scholar said, tightening the clasp and straightening. He dusted off his elegant, strong-looking hands. "We're lost."

The knight exclaimed that they were not _lost_, and pointed at a glimmer in the sky. "We're following the right star."

"That is a witch's house," Thor said. "That's what I said," the scholar said, adding that he knew the way and that it was his, not that of his friend. "Let's just find that dragon," the knight muttered. Thor sighed, but not out loud. He set the odd duo on the path towards the cave and the hill, but before parting ways, asked—

How did a soldier end up in the middle of the sea, anyway? To which a ghost of a man who had no name and no past who was dipped to his elbows in blood replied, It's because he's always been a punk. His visage swam like a pale fish in the ocean at night. He was dreaming, too, the ghost, who said, Like you. Like me. His was a voice to throw even the sun into melancholy, but the morning was calling Thor, made glad of it though if he had wandered further perhaps he would have eventually reached the shores where his lover slept or the mountains that entombed those lost to life. Thor was shedding the dream and its skin; but he would sleep a while longer, the ghost said.

Our friends are gone but I am still here, so I will wake him, he said. He smiled—

In the light of the waking day Thor was troubled by it, the dream, though he remembered it none. He only had the sense that he had not yet finished the conversations he had had. Everywhere he went in his father's house the funereal air stifled him; he went outside to the gates, closed against the intrusion of the outside world, or perhaps it was ward the outside world from the sables within, Thor did not know. The gatekeeper, who had served his father for time immemorial, it seemed, he had known all his life. He had loved to pester him with questions as a child, but grown, he went to him for counsel, though the questions had never completely ceased. The gatekeeper sat him at his table, rough-hewn ash. For his distress, he said, only stories would do, and this was one of those he told:

Once there was a young woman named Jane who loved an immortal warrior. To be sure, she was immortal herself, but the winds that the souls of her people weathered were storm gales, and if their substance did not easily scatter, it was simultaneously crystal and indistinct to the eye, so that even finding them once was no mean feat for those raised imbibing unhurried tides and leisurely breezes, and twice, well, that was hardly ever made mention even in the most glory-wreathed of legends. A storm fit for inclusion in such legends had come and gone, but not all was lost; even washed away, the bridge that had tied her land to her love's had not completely disappeared, the bridgeposts stood. They lay too far apart to be stepping stones, but lay just far enough apart that Jane could imagine that they were guiding stars, set like a ladder in the sky, twinkling bravely on even though the floodwaters had swept everything else connecting her to the one she loved out of existence.

She is gathering stones by the swollen edge of the river, the gatekeeper said. She is casting lines. She is sending paper boats into the rapids and charting their course. Watching the shadows cast by dragonflies among the flattened reeds. She knows that once bridges were built out of birds' wings and yarn. A long time ago. I am old, the gatekeeper said, older than your father, but even I do not remember when last any one in any realm raised such a thing; she may yet.

•••••

Years later, sorrows later, many more ghosts later, after all the dreamers had awakened and when they had returned to sleep this was what he told her, to which she replied, now I will tell you my version. He listened, and that shared part of them which was perishable instead lived for evermore; he dreamt.

•••••


	3. 3 crossover with skyfall (m, nick fury)

series a

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•••••

•••••

crossover with skyfall (m, nick fury)

•••••

She leans on her elbows with her back to the counter and taps her high heels against the smooth wood floor of the bar and lights up a fag and thinks that he's interesting, the American. He's wearing an eyepatch. The skin around it has scarred into jagged stripes. The skin looks new but the muscles are smooth, an odd little contradiction in an otherwise perfectly put-together disguise. Even in a penguin suit and scuffed loafers he looks positively dashing. Like a penny-dreadful pirate escaped from the disco. When she tells him this he smiles and pours her another rye on the rocks.

"Ugh," she says, not needing to feign her disgust, but quaffs it down in one anyway, throwing her head back, showing her throat. When she comes down she blows a smoke ring at his eyepatch and misses. She has always been a terrible shot, she tells him. "But you."

"I practice."

"So do I," she says, stubbing the cigarette into an indecipherable punctuation mark on an overfull glass ashtray. It's handmade, undoubtedly expensive and incontrovertibly hideous. The bar has been vacated—a gunfight will do that. It's quiet save for the nighttime breeze sliding through the half-open wooden blinds and the jukebox playing, "bad moon on the rise-" The music spindles and skips. Criminal, really, but can't be helped. She hasn't got any dimes. Or bullets. Emptied the last of her clip into the wall next to the machine. There is rather a lot of dirt scattered about its feet.

"That potted magnolia deserved it," he says. She shrugs and lights another and offers him the first drag, pinches burning tobacco and paper between fingers in a shape like victory. She has never been modest. The admission feels true, even though she's largely given up on honesty as a lost cause. He keeps his hands in his pants pockets and leans down, careful and polite. He takes the air in deep and blows a ring at the ceiling. She tips her head to one side and it looks almost square.

"They start you out young, don't they," she observes.

"We're all young at heart, ma'am," he says.

"Where did you learn to shoot?"

"Waitering school," he says. "Another rye?"

She makes an unladylike face. "Your people on their way?"

"Just me. Yours?"

"Tardy," she lies. Was just supposed to be surveillance. Drink champagne, mingle, pretend to take somebody out back, coyly steal his keys. The details bore her now, outdated information. The deal her people were supposed to interrupt went live early, much too early. She hadn't had enough time to dial for back up; one makes do. She is fairly certain that crashing one's automobile into a mobster-infested dive, Beretta blazing, is classified _gumption_. She's going to get a commendation. When she tells him that he laughs. He pulls his hands out of his pockets—she doesn't tense, his gun is tucked into the small of his back—and in one hand dangles a link of silver metal. Keys.

"How are you at driving, then?" she asks, reevaluating her exit strategies, pulling the last of the smoke into her lungs. She rubs it out under a heel and surveys the destruction, thinks ahead to the paperwork awaiting, the fact that the night is still young.

"Fantastic," he says.

She fishes her gloves out of her handbag and puts them on. Smudged, but she thinks they will be all right. Her hat is collateral damage though, squashed under a body somewhere—she puts it out of her mind. It's a nice night. The moon is coming up.

"After you," she says. He seems a nice fellow. But she likes keeping her sightlines clear. He smiles, warm, doesn't object.

•••••


	4. 4 team (maxis AU)

series a

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•••••

•••••

team (maxis AU; +)

•••••

The tower was going up whether anyone liked it or not, Pepper decided.

Stark Industries was providing the capital. Not content with leveraging the buyout for the city's bonds, Tony Stark was also financing the complete retrofitting of the decrepit structure that stood at the center of the city. In the process, he was scientifically proven to be losing his hair from the stress, Jarvis reported dutifully, and then added that he was still very handsome even so. Tony gave him a big mental hug since he couldn't give him a raise and turned around to face the others, slightly out of breath from having run up and down several flights of stairs to and from gray, empty storeys, late into the night.

"Who designed this thing? " he demanded. "Why are there so many non-adjacent blocks of condos? You handle this, I'm going to go make more Iron Man suits."

"We need your engineering expertise," Pepper insisted, patiently answering, "And we need the condos because this building is licensed to be mixed-use, even if they all need to be torn down and redone to maximize space. A portion has to be set aside for affordable family housing. I thought you cared about sustainability, Tony."

"_I love sustainability_," Tony said, his eyes blazing. "I could redesign this place to be zero emission in five minutes! But—"

"Someone also needs to put a stop to the mayor's nonsensical zoning policy and budgetary malfeasance and ad hoc development strategy," Pepper said. "That someone is us. We have a responsibility to the environment and the people. This is the first step to our making things right."

At the other end of the conference suite that was serving as the temporary headquarters of the Avengers, buried in blueprints, a concerned Steve asked, "Doesn't this seem excessive?"

Pepper leveled him a cool stare that had been the undoing of many a chief executive officer. "Steve," she said, in perfect equanimity, "we are taking over this town."

Tony was simultaneously smitten and afraid. Steve reluctantly thought the plan over. Luckily for him, he was made of less malleable stuff than most boardrooms, but he was immune to the common cold and most kinds of artillery, not Pepper's business rationale and near supernatural mastery of PowerPoint.

"Someone has to convince City Hall that we need more police and fire stations," he said slowly. "Public safety is at stake."

"No one puts sewage treatment plants next to hydroelectric generators," Bruce, sitting next to him, added, his face stormy. "Who do they think they are?"

"The mayor is bought and paid for, Bruce," Pepper said. "What we need is a change in leadership and a public relations vision. That's why we have to first concentrate on upgrading the tower infrastructure and holding it up as a model of common sense and design savvy." To Tony she said, "We definitely need more elevators. Stairs and escalators are not going to cut it except for the levels just above and below the main lobbies."

To this, Tony muttered that he was going to make personal jetpacks for everyone approved by the tower's co-op board, including cats, dogs, and hamsters. Trying not to look too interested, Steve made an encouraging remark and cleared off some of the conference room table for him.

"This city is rotten to the core," Natasha commented from her seat. She didn't really have a problem with this on a personal level, but she thought watching Pepper motivate Tony was an entertaining way to pass the time before her next mission. "Let's clean up this town. Team."

"I appreciate your support, Agent Romanoff," Pepper said.

"I just want to know if anyone cares about the infestation issue," Clint interjected. "You gotta do something about the ants, Hank."

Hank paused in the middle of discussing the jetpacks with Tony and Bruce and Steve and sighed deeply. "You all complain, but City Hall has nothing on ant politics." He grew pensive. "There is a lot of drama going on right now. A lot of drama. The red queen's daughters are agitating for changes to the primogeniture of—"

They listened to Hank drone on about the incredibly tacky, savage, and sordid invertebrate soap opera taking place underfoot, but thankfully not for too long, for Jan arrived with doughnuts to the silent cheers of everyone who was not Hank as well as a heartfelt "Hurrah!" from Thor. After distributing the goods and putting the remainder at the center of the table, Jan handed Pepper the copies of development contracts from the city's public records office that she had asked for and plopped down on the conference table.

"Whew," Jan said, brushing stray flakes of snow from her coat and toeing off her grime-encrusted heels. She tossed her car keys at Hank, who caught them neatly. "Ice and gridlock the entire way. I would have flown even with the temperatures, but that box is not aerodynamically optimal."

"I'll make you one," Tony said, at which Thor clapped him heartily on the back to show his sincere approval. With Thor distracted, Steve and Clint took the opportunity to make a grab for the last lemon cream only to be thwarted by Natasha, who didn't even like lemon cream. To their consternation, she handed it to Bruce, who didn't notice the dirty looks at all, too absorbed in reading the schematics for the recycling plant for the tower. Pepper furiously flipped through her notes. "That's another thing. Traffic reform."

"Revolution," Tony said absently, sketching jetpacks directly onto the table with a marker most helpfully provided by Steve. "We should more highways and trains to neighboring cities."

Pepper snapped her fingers. "Yes, and substantially expand the subway network while setting up rental bikes and parking facilities at major stations."

"We should have a subway station right inside this tower," Jan suggested. "Ooh, what else?"

"Nickelodeons," Steve said hopefully.

"Greenhouses," Natasha said.

"Arcades," Clint said.

"Health clinics," Bruce said, and looked at Tony, who said, "Free health clinics."

Everyone paused. "What is it," Bruce said.

"You get to have a fun one too," Pepper said magnanimously. Bruce thought about it for a moment.

"A ballroom."

The idea dazzled them all, Jan especially; she threw an arm around Thor's shoulders and danced him around the conference table, earning a moue from Hank, so she danced with him too, making him blush with embarrassment and pleasure.

"Approved," Pepper declared. However, her good mood didn't last: "Are you kidding?" she said as she went through the dozens of proposals for additions to the tower. "Cathedral?"

"I love it," Tony said. "Chartres. Make it happen."

"Tony."

"Chop chop," Tony said, and then at a look from Natasha that he mistook to be that of grave judgment instead of the unindulged laughter that it was, sighed. "Museum of modern art and architecture, fine."

"We should have a planetarium," Steve said, stars in his eyes. "Done," Pepper said, and then dropped her folder in sudden surprise.

"Santa Claus," she exclaimed, pointing at an eyepatched figure flying across the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined the conference suite. All the Avengers crowded the glass to get a look except Natasha, who was listening intently to a communication on her earpiece. "Cap, we're getting reports of a giant laser-emitting robot at the city limits," she said.

"That's in Saint Nick's direct flight path," Clint calculated. Steve got his shield.

"We'll have to continue this meeting later," he told Pepper.

"We have deadlines to meet, so make it snappy," she said with a smile that covered up her worry. Steve gave her a smile back, Tony gave her a peck on the cheek, and the other Avengers promised to come back to help her fill out all the different building permits. The sleigh was flying out of sight, but Pepper made a wishlist as she saw them to the hallway outside that led to the building's one elevator. Santa Claus could lip-read, but he pretended not to have noticed anything, though he did wave—in the spirit of the season.

Last one out the door, Thor waved back.

•••••


	5. 5 future AU (clint)

series a

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•••••

future AU (clint)

•••••

Everyone at SHIELD is a gossip, but Natasha is a pro among pros and Clint is totally a champ. Lying flat, he's resting his head on one of her legs, stealing crumbs from what remains of her box lunch from the canteen; she's lying flat, head pillowed on an overcoat from his last mission that faintly smells of combustion smoke, the fabric's internal scrubbers still working hard. Natasha's eyes are closed, and judging by the remarkably off-tune humming, she's got an aria playing in her ears. She's back from a mission, he doesn't know where. He's back from a mission on one of the planet's satellite stations, a patchwork operation held together with funky legal instruments and leaky inventories and good old hearsay. Clint is feeling just fine about pulling off his small part, sealing the deal in spite of service interruptions in the station's diurnal cycle, artificial coriolis effects going haywire, exploding solar batteries. That's going to be an airtight supply line he's secured, at least until the next time a station operator skims too much off the top and spooked, decides wiping out all traces of ill-begotten deeds is a great idea and worse, a feasible plan. But as the situation stands for now, results delivered is a satisfactory to all concerned, or should be: station operator is still at level, his backers flush, station inhabitants get to sync their lives up to a proper light cycle, the firm buries a crooked insider deep in its pocket. But all that work away from headquarters means he's had to watch the top dogs' latest lark from a distance. Not a bad thing, necessarily. The aria must have ended and the playlist must have hit a recitative, because Natasha takes a break from the humming to say, "They only got as far as a basic vernacular cache before he flipped out and trashed the whole place. I think when he ripped his way out of the rewiring pod he punched out the head of the brain trust. Like Hitler."

"Fury's been wanting to do that for years, he must be miffed," Clint says. He had seen and heard the commotion on the time-delayed main feed after getting back, had dutifully scrutinized the organization-wide containment procedure while it played out across his lenses and screens, ugly and messy. Luckily he had still been in queue for the transit back, crammed into a crate and sucking on a mostly empty can of oxygen, for an impoverished value of luck. The chaos, even viewed remotely, in digests, had been something. Clint cranes his chin up at the ceiling of the hangar. Feeble echoes bounce down at them from the techs busy at work at the other end, the ringing of their tools muffled by the dampers built into the overhead beams. "Least he'll be able to talk to people. What were you doing?"

"The transshipment snafu out of Lunar," Natasha replies. "Runners."

Natasha had missed out on all the fun, too. Clint taps one of her feet with the back of a hand in sympathy. "Have fun cleaning that up while I think of you from my beachfront portico, sipping mint juleps in easy breezy pajamas."

"Classy."

"I agree," a familiar voice says. Clint tips his head backward to see a ragged-edged Phil Coulson looking down at him. He's funny, like a ghost. "Got a job for you, Clint."

"I'm officially going on leave in," Clint makes a point of checking the screen on the inside of his wrist, "exactly one-half of a quarter click."

"Sorry. But the higher-ups really need you to babysit our time traveler while we're in data recovery mode. Everyone else is swamped with the reconstitutions."

"What about Na—"

"She's getting the big guy."

"I'd like to point out how you're not apologizing for siccing me on Stark again, Agent Coulson," Natasha says, eyes still closed.

"Oh, I've got Stark."

Natasha sits up quickly, dislodging Clint, who rolls away with a squawk. "Oy, Coulson."

"Why?" Clint asks, pushing himself upright on his palms. He tucks his legs under him and balances on his heels, hand clasped over wrist over knees. "He's classed neutral. And I thought Stark and the Director worked something out."

"Natasha and I can worry about those details," Coulson replies. Natasha's mouth purses ever so slightly, but she gets to her feet and is already pulling in her mission specs, the muscles around her eyes working minutely as the data saturate her lenses. "You can come with me," Coulson says to Clint. "I don't want to keep Captain America waiting."

"Captain America."

"It pains me to the depths of my soul to hand off on this, I assure you," Coulson adds, walking towards the hangar entry without a backward glance. Clint climbs to his feet, waves his fingers at Natasha and trots up to walk next to him. They get on a footpath headed towards conference six, the one closest to the hangars, passing teams hauling floating dollies stacked with backup equipment all along the corridors.

"I don't think I have the clearance for fraternizing with Captain America."

"As of a miliclick ago, you are cleared."

"I'm not really any kind of a liaison."

"Nonsense. Dr. Schafer thinks you're great, by the way, but you didn't hear it from me."

"Going on leave."

"I've taken the liberty of canceling your rental. They said they would give you a credit. Although it's only good until the end of the season."

"You'll pay for this, Coulson," Clint says. They stop in front of a set of doors that's sliding open with a wave of Coulson's hand.

"Hm?"

Clint gives him a smart salute. "You'll pay for this, Coulson, sir."

"Be nice," he tells him, checking his wrist for updates as they walk through the doors into the small briefing room. It looks like it's been hastily rearranged, the benches along the sides only half collapsed into the walls, the display beams folded along haphazard angles, the diffuse overhead light banishing shadows at odds with the tomb-like atmosphere inside. SHIELD's defrosted relic is leaning against the wall facing the door, expression neutral and body language wary. He looks slightly glassy-eyed. Clint wonders briefly if he's been tranquilized, but according to the profile superimposed on the man's image on his lenses he's unsusceptible to all known substances, which must extend to even the wide array of psychotropic cocktails at the organization's disposal, no one here tosses around phrases like "all known" if anyone can help it. Lack of sleep and lingering shock, then. Clint is surprised that he's not in quarantine somewhere, but given the havoc he wreaked a few decaclicks ago, the higher-ups must have decided that free-ranging this asset was preferable to the alternative on the recent record. He's been put in some nondescript civilian gear, dark trousers and boots, ivory shirt, plain-cut, a jacket in indigo with all of its data lines looping inane, indeterminate chatter. His eyes snap into focus when he sees Coulson, and his glance slides over to Clint and back. "Morning."

"Morning. This is Clint Barton, one of our finest," Coulson says without preamble. "Agent Barton will be helping you to get adjusted around here."

"Honor to meet you, Captain Rogers," Clint says at the cue, extending his hand.

"I'm— just Steve is fine," the man says, shaking it with a steady grip at odds with the near-imperceptible waver in his voice. "I don't think it matters anymore."

"Did you sleep well?" Coulson asks, even though the numbers are there for both him and Clint to see.

"Just fine," comes the answer, a lie.

"Did MedTech brief you already?"

"Yes." Not a lie. He indicates a folder on the table next to him. Coulson nods and hands it to Clint. He appreciates the gesture — it's not bad, he's had to operate with much less elegant true-false calibrations as these things go. He takes the folder from Coulson and runs a thumb over the edge of it, mouth going a little dry at the unimaginable luxury of the woodpulp paper inside, simultaneously smooth-edged and rough to the touch. He flips through the sheets, not awkwardly, guiltily, a stray crumb from his fingers a reproachful testament to the feelings he doesn't show.

"How were the other briefings?"

"I think I've sat through enough of them to last me a while."

Coulson gives their time traveler a sympathetic look. "It was rushed, I know. I'm afraid I am going to be occupied while we're getting our systems back on track, but if you need anything, Agent Barton is your man."

"Thanks," Steve says. Coulson gives him a smile and the two of them a wave before excusing himself as he races through the new systems updates being broadcast from the central banks. The relevant parts of the optic data filter through to Clint as with any operative. Suddenly the sheaf of papers in his hands feels as heavy as a rock. Not sure what to do with the folder, Clint opts to hand it back to Steve, who sets it down on the table again, squaring its edges with the table's.

"You don't want to hang on to it?"

"Already read it twice," Steve answers. "We're not staying?"

It takes Clint aback that he would leave it there, and it must show, because Steve frowns. "Should I have given it to Agent Coulson? It didn't say classified."

"That's fine, I can do that," Clint smoothly says, recovering. He retrieves the folder and tucks it under one arm. There are absolutely no tags or tracers in the materials, at least none that his lenses or screens can pick up, so it's not likely anything anyone can use, and the information printed inside is just bland descriptions of the city taken straight from the mayor's official databank. The paper would fetch a tidy sum, but even if the firm were to lose track of the sheets, they would be easy enough to find behind the counter of one of the local curiosity dealers. Clint suspects that Review is supposed pick it up when they come by later to sweep the room, but then he remembers the feeling of it on his fingertips and figures there's no harm in personally making sure the folder gets back to the right department.

"I guess we better go see about getting you settled," Clint says. The readout he pulls up on his lenses say that Blake has been copied on the brief. He steps out of the room and Steve falls in step behind him very quickly, almost hopping across the threshold. He doesn't have any tags on him yet, Clint realizes, none of the doors at headquarters open without being keyed with the proper challenges and permissions. The panels slide closed and melt back into the walls, only a couple of scanner patches indicating where they'd been.

"Heard they only managed to fit you with some vernacular," Clint says as they start walking. His tone is deliberately casual, but Steve tenses up.

"Yeah. Mostly didn't take."

Clint squashes a wince right down. The physiological profile on Captain America, at least the version he got, viewed on its side, is something our of a horror story. And personalizing the lenses would have been the easy part; it's a good thing no one thought of starting with the aural implants first. "We can set you up with a scan tag for now so that you can get around."

"Sounds all right."

"Heard about the mix-up. We've seen much worse around here," Clint adds. This is quite true, although the extent of the damage Coulson and the others are dealing with perplexes him—it seems beyond the means of the man walking next to him, regardless of whether or not he's a super soldier, even if he's saying things like, "I exploded a 'telematic carrel,' apparently."

Which is definitely a major piece of equipment. Clint does some reshuffling of his mental inventory of the local communications arrays. With a discreet flicker of a couple of fingers on the side not holding the folder, he pulls up the damage report summaries from MedTech on his lenses again. "SHIELD isn't going to crash because you busted a few data pods." And a telematic carrel. And an entire systemwide feedback loop's worth of teloptic stabilizers. And a long list of some other things. That's what Natasha would call _resourceful_.

Steve looks miserable, not mollified. "I sure hope not."

"Don't worry about it," Clint says, even though he sees that it's a lost cause. He takes the lead and they walk to an elevator that takes them to the analysts' suites. Blake's workstation is down the right side artery, past a checkpoint, and just short of the central atrium. Clint waits until the audio cue for the clear and then passes through the door sliding open with Steve. Blake greets them with his customary dourness and then informs that Clint is going to have to escort Captain America to the apartment they've arranged for him on foot and via the city's civilian transports.

"You can't call us a privicar?" Clint asks skeptically.

"Systems fritz, Agent Barton. Priority ratings have been activated on all available resources," Blake says, sounding polite and disapproving at the same time, one of his special abilities on file.

"What kind of fritz?" Clint asks. The higher-level feeds have been running "need to know" basis since he returned planetside, and he's only gotten digests, heavily edited at best, skeletal otherwise. He hasn't hit his personal threshold for wanting to snoop around yet, although it feels like that point is fast approaching.

"Terminal. Some kind of problem with the breaktimes," Blake says. "Sediment buildup messing up our techs' calibrations."

"That so."

Blake glances at his wrist. "That's what they tell me. Block 59, across the river." He twists the parent screen around with a wave of a hand. "Erasmus Grand," he elaborates. "Wish I lived in EG 59."

Clint pauses at the images on the display. "Why do you want us to take that route?"

"I can find my way by myself, you don't have to go to the trouble," Steve says, the paleness of his face telling Clint the exact opposite. He tamps the irritation down. "It's no trouble," he says. But Coulson is going to get it, he thinks moodily.

"Orders," Blake says with as shrug. He drags one of the free-standing display arms housing a physical screen towards them and shows Steve the eye-level view of a street lined with authentic replica brownstones and priceless imported elms. "Someone must really like you."

"It looks familiar," Steve says, expression hollow.

"It's an amazing neighborhood," Blake says, swinging the screen back to its original position. He grows dourer. "Magnificent trees."

"Just give us the tags, Blake," Clint says.

The clearance come over the part of the analysts' network he's plugged into and Clint acknowledges his receipt of the data with a rapid blink. Blake takes out a narrow, flat piece of copycarbon and presses it right above Steve's left eyebrow, where the white of the material changes to match his skin and shrinks as it adheres, becoming indistinguishable except for an occasional faint shimmer from the band's micro-reflectors. "Best we could do on short notice," Blake says, and explains to Steve that it's been coded with all the tags he's going to need to take the route charted on the screen, as well as a few extra. "They're like tolls or passes," Blake explains. "A way of letting the city grid know that you're an ordinary citizen with all his bills and dues paid. Until we find a way around the optics issue."

"I understand," Steve says. Clint is not convinced that he does. "We better get going," he says, double-checking the route against his databank. It seems unnecessarily complicated, making the trip four times as long as it would have been if they could have taken a bridge shuttle across the water, or better yet, a private unmanned roadster. The organization keeps a fleet of them stationed at headquarters and at various points in the city, ready to be painted over with the right codes for blending in with the real cars. Fast, secure. Instead, Clint is going to have to take them south via surface streets and down to the sub-T, get out on one of the mall interchanges under the river, switch trains, disembark and backtrack, take another train, and then once on the other side, take a shuttle and a walking route that cloverleafs around instead of shooting straight to their destination. Moreover, the posh neighborhood isn't one where the firm has a lot of hardware installed, not like in the superblocks that take up half the city. None of it makes much sense, it's frustrating. With Blake he knows it's mostly futile but tries anyway. "Any chance you could scrounge us a ride from Impound?"

"Barton, even the bicycles are fritzed," Blake answers. "I suggest you be on your way."

Clint gives him a curt nod and he and Steve head out, leaving the analysts' workstations behind. They follow the artery to a midlevel checkpoint where they're directed to a side shunt to avoid running into the tech crews who are practically swarming in the main thoroughfares. They walk silently up the passageway, Clint taking the opportunity to go through rest of Steve Rogers' profile, bathed in the yellow-green emergency lighting emanating from the wall panels, each of the squares housing nutritive jelly and bioluminescent bacteria. At street-level check he and Steve pass through the set of scanners that are supposed to pick up any unauthorized materials, and only a little reluctantly Clint hands the folder over. He fills out an inventory for the agents posted there, who look Steve over unabashedly, fascinated—a couple of guns, check, optics interference mesh, check, standard screens, check, one temporally displaced super-soldier, check—and together with the asset signed into his charge steps out into the hazy daylight of the city. Steve takes a deep breath of the filtered air and grimaces.

"What?" Clint asks as they start heading down the sidewalk.

"I'd forgotten how clean it was," Steve replies. It strikes Clint as strange that this would be the detail of his short unauthorized excursion outside that he would bring up.

"Bioscrubbers," Clint says. "Other parts of the city they're not kept as fresh as this, if bad smells are what you're missing."

"They're not," Steve says. It's another little lie. "Where are you from?"

"Not here," Clint answers.

"Classified?"

"Nah, just boring," Clint says. "Didn't grow up around here, but Two is all right."

"I'm never going to get used to calling it that."

Clint isn't sure if it's a good idea to talk about this, or if he should try to steer this awkward attempt at conversation to something different. His brain comes up mostly blank except for those ones the firm explicitly tells agents not to talk about in the mandatory harassment training, and wishes that Natasha were walking with them. He could have been in that moment admiring the easy expression of concern and affection in her craft rather than scrambling his eyes for topics pre-approved by high command, which usually means topics pre-approved by either Agents Coulson or Hill, since Clint has it on irrefutable authority—Natasha's, distilled from observations gotten first-hand—that the Director tends to delegate regarding certain parts of certain meetings in which his one eye also glazes over, slightly. "It's the one most like the original," he says. "Good thing they didn't wake you up in one of the other ones."

"There are more?"

"You know, like Four, that's a basketcase. New York is the oldest franchise there is," Clint says. "Best selling module after Singapore at five. They're up to, hm, Eight?"

"Franchise."

"Fighting some big suit against Singapore Three though, something about brand dilution."

"I don't understand."

"No one really gets S'pore-Three," Clint says with a tiny shrug.

"All right," Steve says.

"I've heard that Two is practically a replica of One."

"Not quite."

"But it's close?"

"Well," Steve says, letting out a short breath, "I can see that someone tried."

"That's good," Clint says, shutting that disaster down. The two of them move through the daytime crowds, a two-man island of silence. The giant advertising frames hanging down over the top of the buildings wink brightly. The air is saturated with advertisement cues of all sizes, each clamoring for someone to access and give it precious attention. Private roadsters and municipal taxis slide slowly by at regulation speed, though Clint spots more than a few with tampered meters. A couple of xanadus, their rounded metal limbs gleaming, beckon from the corners, promising the best deals on the latest gastronomical craze to hit the town, exotic fungi melted into neon-colored gels. Clint has to take time out of scanning their path for anything suspicious to periodically wipe off one of the city's great nuisances from his lenses, unlicensed ads beamed out from tiny bulbs stuck to the walls. There's little chance of the garden-variety adverts posing a security risk, but even though the technology to block them is always evolving, it never seems to stay ahead of the bulbs' constantly changing programming. The city regularly sends out tiny drones to crawl along the walls and scrape them off, but they inevitably come back, a little like bacteria, always multiplying. Clint wants to say something to Steve, who's swiveling his head and staring at the pedestrians passing them by, he's drawing attention to them. His erratic movements don't look a thing like any of the standard parsing languages. He kind of looks like he's zoned out on something neurochemical and they're starting to get stares back, the image of Steve beginning to get disruptive enough to cut through the layers of data on people's lenses. Clint spots one of the better pushcarts around the area in what seems like just in the nick of time.

"Are you hungry?" Clint asks.

Steve breaks off from staring at everybody else to stare at him.

"Food," Clint says, shrugging further into his jacket even though the city's ambient temperature controls are working just fine. "Don't know about you, but I could go for something to eat."

Steve heaves a breath out and nods, so Clint takes him across the street—by jaywalking, but Clint is not above using his SHIELD tech to keep the ticket-writing scanners from pinging them—towards the cart. The line is only five people deep, it doesn't take them long to reach its front.

"What kind of food is it?" Steve asks Clint, and hearing him, the vendor bristles. "Whaddaya mean what kind? The best tower in the city, that's what."

"Don't mind him," Clint quickly says, flashing through his mental notes for the vendor. He's a nice fellow, just a little touchy on the subject of his ware. He has major duct damage in his right eye, got it in a fight when he was a kid in the superblocks pushed up against the city limits and family never had enough money to get it properly fixed, and the regrafting now would set him back too much—want to send my kid to higher ed offplanet, he once told Clint.

"My buddy here is visiting from New York One," he says. "Well, more like New York Zero."

The vendor opens his mouth and does a double take, his annoyance instantly evaporating. "A blue blood, hey!" he says. "My great-times-two-oh grand was from Joy-Z," he proudly says. "You and me got the peagree, you know? How are those latest P-eycheefyers working out?"

Steve looks at Clint for help, and he claps him on the shoulder. "Oh, you know those politicians and their referendums to de-acidify the oceans, it's all just to look good," he says.

"If they get it right on one side, then they'll get it wrong on the other," Steve says, not quite able to get rid of the lost expression on his face but quick on the uptake still. The vendor tuts his tongue and agrees, criticizing the factional strife, endemic, while scooping and rolling their orders out. "Think they'll ever get it?" he asks Steve, handing him the steak, the best on this block, see-through-thin slices of crispy grub sautéed with airy honeycombs of tofu cake and drizzled with chopped scallions and chili-and-plum puree.

"I daren't say," Steve answers, a container in one hand. The vendor obligingly gives him a little roll of chewy rice paper for the other. "They'll never get it right. Our jewel, frittered away," he complains. Clint makes a noise of agreement and wraps his rice paper around a fingerful of the concoction and takes a big bite. "Awesome," he tells the vendor, who smiles broadly at them and tries to make more small talk, but Clint manages to extricate himself and Steve before the discussion gets anywhere, helped along by the impatient line behind them. Clint and Steve move out of the way to make room and start walking down the sidewalk. Watching Clint, Steve mimics him and takes a big bite.

"It's good," he says, barely chewing before swallowing. He takes a few more steps and has to double over from choking on the bite. "Great," he says, his voice muffled.

"It's not _that_ good," Clint says. "You want to sit down for a bit?"

Steve just nods and they park themselves on the curb on the corner. Clint orders a couple of bottled beers from the closest everyday shop, paying with one of his civilian accounts, and a cycler swoops by to drop them off. Steve just shakes his head at the entire exchange but doesn't object to the beer. They scarf the impromptu meal down, chewing silently, watching the people and cars and cycles rush by. Clint activates the signal dampers woven into his jacket collar, its active radius just enough to cover Steve as well at this distance, and concentrates on mopping up the last of the sauce with his last remaining piece of rice paper.

"Back home only bums ate and drank sitting on the street. Deliver a couple of jackets of alky and they'd call you a hero," Steve says thoughtfully.

"You calling me a bum?"

"If the shoe fits," Steve says, taking a swig and glancing down at his feet, "I guess I would be one, too."

"We're too responsible to be bums," Clint sooths. "Goons, maybe."

Steve looks at him askance. "That an official designation?"

"Well according to this guy, Stark, we—"

Steve jumps like he's been bit. "Stark?"

Recalling the profile, Clint wonders what kinds of pro forma briefings they had him sit through. If the wake-up fiasco is any indication, there could be a lot more trial and error in the future where the firm and Captain America are concerned. "Corp clone of Howard Stark's son," he replies.

"Clone."

"One of the ways people came up with to keep properties in perpetuity, clones, suspension, transplantation, decelerated growth, time-sunder, yadda," Clint says. "Stark Industries is old and it's big. You don't really want to mess with them. Everyone is on edge lately because no one knows what they're is going to do next."

"Why is that?"

Clint fills him in on the clone's abduction and his conservator's takeover gambit, the arcane creation that is the Iron Man, the uncertain future of the biggest arms and weapontech manufacturer in the known human universe. There are still too many pieces of the story that he's missing, but the bare-bones aspect of it actually works; any more detail and he might be judging it prudent to make himself scarce, going by Steve's expression. "But he hasn't been seen since that journo confab," Clint tells him. "Our sources think he's doing some kind of major corporate restructuring."

"Doesn't sound like a pretty process."

"Doubtful."

"But he's not Howard Stark."

"No."

Steve looks saddened and relieved at the same time. The drowning look in his eyes dries into something infinitely more wretched. Clint wonders what it's like, what he'd do, if he were castawayed into some far-off future.

"What about..."

"Probably not, but I can check for you," Clint begins, but the blood drains from Steve's face and he shakes his head slowly. His fingers on the neck of the bottle tighten and for a moment Clint is sure that it's going to shatter.

"Thanks but no thanks," Steve says, his voice steady, sets it down on the sidewalk with a soft clink. Clint chalks up the exchange as a near miss, lucky break, and calls another cycler to take their bottles. A couple of credits land back in his account with a cute little ping. Clint stands and dusts himself off and Steve gets up a moment later, looking less unnerved and more acquiescent; Clint isn't fooled. They start again, reach the first sub-T station on their route, get on the train without any trouble and get off at the underground mall exchange marked on Clint's maps. The crowds on the wide boulevards, lit by panels that simulate the day, don't seem to bother Steve. He has no trouble keeping clear of the various vehicles sliding around the boulevards' central strip, for which Clint is glad, but he does wish that he would move a little more normally in the meanwhile.

The interchange is one of the more famous ones in the city, lined with expensive boutiques and gleaming machines, spreading out like the roots of a well-pruned tree. Clint wonders if maybe the firm just wanted to show off the nicer parts of the city to their newest acquisition. There are a fair number of people walking around, but most of the lunch crowd has gone back to their working places. They pass by a row of parimutuels outside a brightly lit gambling joint, the machines wrapped up and written over with 'temporarily out of service' signs and advertisements for stimulants and personal filtration systems and cut-rate financing for lens upgrades. The sluggish movement of ink under the membranes seems to unnerve Steve, and Clint has to explain to him how the material works before realizing that it's the gambling itself, but is distracted by a panicked shout from the antique shop next to the card parlor.

Steve reacts first, rushing in, shoving the old-fashioned doors open; Clint scans their surroundings, sends an update on their location and rushes after him, following him by data, not sight. He pushes one of the doors open and ducks in, and then ducks _down_, barely getting out of the way in time, rolling to one side, as something whizzes past his head. The membrane sack splashes open against the edge of the door into a sodden confetti of valuable old coins, silver-nickel centuries and gold millenniums. Clint throws up an arm to shield his head, the coins bouncing off his left side, and runs behind an oversized amphora.

"Stay down," Steve shouts at him, already all the way in the back. Gunfire drowns out the rest. Four hostiles, black market flechettes. They stud the fake wood cuckoo clocks hung up behind the blown-apart central counter. Real wood would have exploded; the earthenware does, and Clint has to leap for new cover behind a cabinet full of real-coral jewelry and set of scale replica personal armor, a gleaming, Interregnum-era suit. He keeps low to the ground and makes his way towards the back of the store. He looks up to see that Steve has found a piece of broken-off countertop and is using it to shield himself and the shop owner, crouched in the far corner and bleeding from the head. The cuts are shallow. She's going to be fine if they can take the thieves out and call in a city emergency team. With the two of them nowhere to be found when the municipal authorities get here, ideally.

Steve frantically gestures at him to stay back and it's ludicrous, he doesn't even have any weapons. He has absolutely nothing. No ports, no uplinks, no lenses, no implants, no jacks, no connectors, _nothing_. Clint's gun slides into his hand from his jacket sleeve and fits itself into his palm. The hostiles have their jammers online, but Clint's firm-issue data extractor shreds through them, distills the information it finds into a piecemeal profile for each, and his databank matches them up with entries in the SHIELD system, sends out an alert. One of them is trying to hack him, probably after having given up on Steve, in a laughable third-rate effort. Amateurs, then.

"Stay there," Clint tells Steve at the same time he fires off a pair of three rounds, hitting the two hostiles closest to Steve and the shop owner in one shoulder, elbow and hip each; they go down and their gun muzzles go up, pockmark the ceiling before they fall, curl up, those joints locked into place by the foam rapidly expanding outward from the rounds. The ceiling is animated with classical cherubs fluttering about a blue sky, arrested in mid-flight by the store's security system protocols. The other two hostiles suddenly disappear into the wall and that's when Clint sees them, the melt-vices and the hole leading to the safe of the parlor next door. That's when he hears it, the sound of the parlor's security system crashing, fuzzy blips, and the remaining hostiles activating personal shields once they're out the other side, a distinctive whine he would know anywhere from countless engagements.

He turns his sound dampers up to the max just before the safe door gets blown open, brings the levels back down in time to hear screams from the card parlor. Steve runs in after them. Clint curses silently and kicks the downed hostiles' weapons out of their reach and jumps in after him, his skin buzzing from the shockwave.

He loses sight of the two hostiles and Steve for a moment, then there's a series of bangs and a loud yelp, and Clint exits the other side through the front of the blown-open safe to pull up just short of a tall, pale, dark-haired civilian who has Steve frozen at the end of his arm, fingertips just barely touching a shoulder. But Steve's not hurt, just surprised into stillness; the hostiles groan at their feet, bodies twisting around what Clint thinks are impact wounds.

The civilian withdraws his arm and leans against a card table occupied by a handful more good-looking tourists in the same unbelievably garish clothing. Clint copies and stores the image to show to Natasha later, but all of a sudden everything blurs and his lenses spasm. It's so unexpected that he goes down on one knee but before it hits the carpeted floor Steve catches him by a shoulder, lightning-fast. Clint shuts his eyes and immediately runs a diagnostic, wondering if he's gotten caught up in some kind of sophisticated interference mesh, even though his firm-issue lenses are much more advanced than what most civilians carry in their skulls and none of his active defenses have tripped over anything, not as far as he can tell. It returns him an all-systems-clear.

"Loki, what have you caught?" a jolly voice calls out. One of Clint's automatic recording protocols kick in and his head snaps up. Protocols for taking down any and all available data on the All-Speak flash through his lenses and he realizes that he's looking at _six_ _Asgardians_ parked in front of a card table. Judging by what's on the table Dealer loses, but is nowhere to be seen. The handful of people sitting at the next few over, stunned by the explosion, are coughing and gaping at the rubble. A couple of them are already starting to upload breathless video and commentary to their proprietary networks—Clint throws his own jammers up and sends headquarters a request to the network for an immediate, complete, top-down scrub for this entire block, end-point to be determined, gets back a standby. He slips his gun back up his sleeve. He wonders what they're doing here, there aren't any envoys listed in any of the Terminal schedules, public or otherwise, haven't been for a long while, in fact. Tourists? He has never heard of such a thing, but he doesn't think they're spies. They don't give off the right vibe, most of them, anyway.

"Scoundrels," the one called Loki says. Steve starts to object as he's helping Clint up. "We're having an adventure," Clint quickly says, the first thing that comes to his mind.

The blond Asgardian sits up a little straighter. "Is that so?"

"_Delinquents_," Loki pronounces. Clint's lenses plunge into static and then snap back to normal. Jacket. Sequins. That's reality. But he could have sworn he'd just seen— "We should turn them over to the Midgardian authorities and be on our way."

"But these men may need further assistance."

"Heed, brother. I'll not misspend another moment in this wasteland so that you and your friends can go carousing with the local hooligans."

"I don't carouse on the first date," Clint tells them, but is seemingly ignored; one of the other Asgardians at the table speaks up, a frown narrowing her eyes.

"We should not keep Heimdall waiting."

"What, Sif, agreeing with Loki!"

"Fearless Fandral, stranger things have happened," Loki says.

"Your entire love life," Sif adds. Fandral smiles and shrugs, one shoulder for each of his interlocutors. "The fates I obey, not question. But should—"

He's interrupted by a spray of flechettes into the air from one of the downed hostiles. People scream and run outside, Clint draws his gun again and gets in a hard round, knocking the gun out of the thief's hands, but the black market gun spins out in an erratic arc and the next thing he knows is Steve tackling him to the floor out of the way. His back hits the ground and he hears another crash, and then a "Well, Thor." Loki's voice. He looks up to see the big blond Asgardian standing over the unconscious hostile, looking pleased. The other Asgardians thump the table in approval, making the chips dance.

"Well done, you mean!"

"Thank you, Volstagg."

The Asgardians were directly in the line of fire, Clint is sure of it, but none of the men or the woman has a hair out of place. They're not like Steve, not quite; now that he's looking, really looking, there's _noise_ around them, but nothing he can make sense of, nothing he can grab onto. Steve helps him up, lightly gripping one of his arms by the elbow.

"Thanks Cap," Clint says without thinking as he climbs to his feet.

"Don't call me that," Steve says tightly. He lets him go and steps back, unreadable. The Asgardian Loki called brother and Thor, in good cheer, divides his glance between them. "Cap?" he asks, curious.

"No," Steve snaps. Thor's smile fades. Clint makes an executive decision.

"The Captain is retired from active duty, he means," he says. "He's visiting friends from out of town."

"I see! You are a soldier?" Thor asks. He doesn't seem much surprised. The broad, friendly smile is back. Clint gets the feeling that he should forget about letting his guard down at all.

"Was," Steve says.

Thor nods. "Sometimes the trials of war weigh hard upon us." Steve's expression hardens. Loki steps in.

"The Bifrost awaits, o wise one," he says, in a tone so treeless, smooth and level that it could no more hide a mere ant than a mote of sarcasm. It's the kind of display at which Natasha would whistle in appreciation. Clint is nowhere near that: "Sorry to have crashed your party," he tells the Asgardian group. Checking 'Bifrost' in his databank doesn't turn up anything when he tries to cross-reference it; he doesn't like things he can't cross-reference, not at all. An indicator trembles along the underside of his left thumb, telling him that one of the firm's back-up teams is also on its way.

"I did not know Midgard had such warriors as these," Thor goes on, animated. He turns to Steve and Clint wonders what he saw. The security feeds are oddly degraded, the images fuzzed into uselessness with inexplicable haloes. "Whence do you hail?"

"He would fare ill on our journeys," one of the other Asgardians, short and dark-haired, says. Clint starts reaching for his gun but stops when Loki's arm coils out and he takes Steve by the throat, lifts him off the ground, flexes his fingers in, just a tad. Steve's hands come up to claw at Loki's wrists and a vein pops up on his forehead. "What—"

"A touch more proofed 'gainst, friend Hogun," Loki says, his expression clinical. He sets Steve down just as gently. "A hair's breadth."

"Don't do that again," Steve says, red-faced, shoving Loki's hand away and stumbling back a step.

Loki wipes the palm of his hand against his intricate outer robe. Clint blinks and it's a shimmering long-sleeved jacket. The guy is too slick to allow himself a look of disdain; a benign smile is what they get instead. "No, you may be certain of that," he says agreeably. In Clint's gut a fledgling hate hatches.

"You must forgive my lout of a brother," Thor says, clapping Steve on the back, making him jump and wheel around, an arm outflung. It glances off the Asgardian's armored chest—brightly patterned shirt—and neither of them even notices; from the force of the ricochet Clint guesses that if that had been him, he would be nursing a broken hand. "Perhaps a thousand years more he will have manners worth speaking of."

Steve flinches. Loki makes a sound of amusement. Clint keeps everything on neutral.

"You gave your word," Fandral reminds Thor, who starts to protest, but hearing the muted sirens starting to filter through the air, tosses the two of them a disappointed look. The other Asgardians rise to their feet, and, impossibly, in the next moment, disappear completely from every display Clint has up and every audio pickup he has running, and that includes the card parlor's security feeds, internal and external.

But Steve's eyes are tracking something still. Clint frowns even as an exponentially cascading array of new things descends on his senses, demanding his attention: updates to incorporate into his screens, protocol recalibrations to launch objections to, and All-Speak data to package for the analysts. He gets a heads-up and a temporary cover from the network just before the armed municipal police arrive in their frayed, underpaid glory to surround the place. He tugs Steve behind him to make a run back out through the blasted-open vault, grabbing the antique shop owner on the way, and after leaving her sitting up next to the doors—Clint needs to insist on that to Steve, who only does reluctantly—they shove their way into the stream of people walking dazedly from the gambling parlor.

The city's first responders are starting to arrive. Their warning sirens proceed them like a wave, tinting all the sensory organs within the interchange ombre with official notices: this area cleared by authority for regulatory action, cooperation strongly encouraged for the good of public order, violators will be fined such-and-such amounts, event identification codes follow, properly label and direct any claims, comments or complaints to bureaus so-and-so, et cetera, ad nauseum. Clint clears the city communiqués from his screens as soon as he verifies the information.

The municipal forces, teams of two in units of three, corral the people stumbling out and the crowd gathering just outside the doors first and then enter the parlor to pick up the hostiles. Clint picks out from among them a fake police team, their identifying tags and markers blurred, dispatched by the firm to get them out. The clean-up team is right behind and moves in with surgical precision, perfect paramedics for the injured civilians and ruthless data surgeons for the rest. The shadow team to the cleaners, the real backup, hovers just at the edges of his awareness. Clint realizes that he is (along with Steve) getting extracted; he is never going to live this down. He can just see Coulson's non-judgmental face looking at him during the debriefing already; the day has officially gone from worse to horsecrap. The newly-arrived agents herd him and Steve to the edge of the cordon under the guise of checking them over for injuries and infarctions, where they discreetly relieve him of his weapons to put in the zero-signal containers they have ready—the municipal police will have their media cordon and deep scanners activated and running soon. He goes through the motions of the extraction protocol. Steve sticks close.

"Thank you, good citizen. Your heroic bravery is much appreciated," fake police officer who is a SHIELD agent Clint totally knows says, hamming it up for anyone who's within observing distance.

"The city is quite lucky to have had such an outstanding member of the public at the right place and the right time," fake police officer who is a SHIELD agent Clint totally knows number two adds, not one to miss out on a truly golden opportunity to rib Clint "Hawkeye" Barton in a live scenario. Clint's "I am going to kick both of your asses on the mats," comes out as a chirpy "Oh, sure, happy to help." To Steve he says, "Our tails." the data surgeons and shadows included. Babysitting is never a one-person job and as far as the firm is concerned, all accountability chains loop,

"Figured," Steve says.

With the number of people milling around they don't have many options for getting out of there, much less return to their pre-set route. The other babysitters, even the shadows, receive orders to stay and scrape up every last bit of useable data from the scene and fake police officer Clint totally knows number one hustles them to a fake police car. Blake wasn't kidding, the code job on the surface of the vehicle is barely holding together. It even looks like it might have been surreptitiously requisitioned from one of the city's public carports, rather than passed through the firm's hardware station. If the surgical teams weren't running interference, even an ordinary street scanner would have been able to pick up on the counterfeiting.

"Looked like they were thrown out of a fancy costume party," Steve comments on the way. Clint gives him a sideways look.

"Those were aliens," he tells Steve as they enter the car one after another. Clint makes room for the other agent who slides in partway in front of the car's control panel, a flat circle that rests on top of the control core. The agent retrieves his biometrics from the car's databank, wiping it clean, and then uploads a new set of codes that will take the car back to headquarters. In Clint's schedule a slot for a formal, in-person debriefing opens up. He acknowledges the change and settles into one end of the seat. It's tight squeeze with the three of them.

"That was going to be my next guess," Steve says, trying to hunch himself down into the low-ceilinged space, no hint of a joke there.

"Good guess," Clint says, for equilibrium's sake.

"You're set," the agent announces, stealing a glance at Steve as he scoots back out. "High priority tags."

"Does that mean fast?" Clint asks.

The agent shrugs. "City reshuffled the traffic combinatrix again, so... not so much." He offers him an apologetic face. "Best codes I could snag under the circumstances. Fritz, damn Terminal."

"I heard."

"Blake," the agent says. "Did you know that he's planning to remodel his condo?"

"Again? Sitwell said that he just redid his kitchen."

"What. Then maybe it was just the kitchen," the agent replies. "Anyway. Don't forget to say hello for us peons, Barton."

Clint snorts and raises a hand in acknowledgment as the agent pulls the door shut. Steve looks at the screen and scoots back in the narrow seat, buckling in, frowning, at Clint's gesture. "Where are we going?" he asks as the car drifts into the center strip and passes through the barrier set up by the police. As it enters the interchange outflow the wheels pull themselves up and the induction motor kicks in. The car starts to glide along the electromagnetic lift into the vehicle-only tunnel that will take them back up to the surface level.

"Back to headquarters," Clint replies. "I think getting you to your new place will have to wait."

"Will that lady be all right?"

"Our medical team's got her, she should be."

"Good." There's another silence.

"Where do you live?" Steve asks him in an attempt to change it into something more palatable. Clint knows that it's just curiosity, but the question makes him itch. "A superblock a few interchanges over," he answers. His apartment is kind of crap. But he likes how it has all of his stuff taped up on the walls and papered all over his kitchen table and boxed into the built-in storage shelves. He could have afforded a nicer place, but he's one of those people who believes in rainy days. This time last cycle there was an old bachelor rat living in his walls that he got to calling Esteban. He hasn't seen him around in a while. "It's a dump," Clint says, frank.

"Do you like living there?"

"It's great," he says, and gets a faint smile back. Clint runs the scene in the gambling parlor over in his head. The playback streaming into his eyes and ears is a jumbled, nearly unintelligible mess, more so than the usual. "Those people we saw. What were they wearing?"

Steve answers him as if it should have been obvious. "Armor and fancy capes. Kind of hard to miss." The wariness returns. "Why do you ask?"

"I couldn't pick up on it, but they might have been running some kind of advanced interference mesh," Clint answers.

"Oh."

Clint tries changing the parameters for both the audio and video playback and gets the same result—the exact same incomprehensible noise, but no change whatsoever in the material. He can't tell what it is, but whatever it is, it stays uniform. The different timeframes and aspect ratios he tries return the same result, _no distortion_. A feeling, amorphous, creeps up his spine. "Capes, really?" he asks Steve to try to distract himself, tamp it down.

"Capes, really."

"That's interesting."

"If I ask you why you think that's interesting, will I understand your explanation?"

"Sure. You've been doing fine."

Steve sits back in his seat, or tries to. He glances out the car window. "Doesn't seem like it."

"Don't sell yourself short," Clint tells him.

"Don't think it matters."

Clint can't think of anything encouraging to say. "Well, you fight good," he says after a pause.

"You saw me?"

"Local network surveillance," Clint says. The scant sections uncorrupted by noise, he adds.

Steve's nose scrunches and he rubs his eyes. "Right." He looks down at his feet. "It barely seems like we're moving."

It's also that the firm makes sure that it has the best of the best, whether that happens to be mechanical resources or human, but Clint simply says, "The wonders of the technology of the future," and hopes that he's coming across as sufficiently sunny, though he doesn't think Steve is buying it. Clint taps the smooth floor of the car with a toe. "When I—"

The car lurches. His network connections go down. Clint puts his hands against a door and the control panel to steady himself. He checks the control panel but nothing looks amiss, the car's external cameras show smooth pavement and other cars, all traveling at the same regulation speed on the road that leads out of the underground interchange onto surface roads. Everything is perfect—the first sign that something is wrong, always.

The data displayed on the control panel hasn't changed. When he checks it again, the car has disappeared from the map. He doesn't have his guns but he couldn't have shot their way out anyway, the doors are magnetically sealed. If he got the doors open, though, maybe Steve would survive, but the current that runs along the road surface is likely to electrocute him.

This is probably why they were given a completely random route, Clint thinks: someone is after them, or more precisely, Steve, not that the roundabout way seems to have helped. Whoever it is anticipated the firm's response. The number of entities that can counter the pieces that the firm has on the chessboard on their own Clint can count on one hand. There hasn't been anything about any kind of joint projects or coordinated movements on the grapevines, but he hadn't heard anything about an ancient soldier coming back to life before Natasha clued him in, either. He decides that running through the short list comes later; right now he has to get them out of the commandeered car and to a safe or at least defensible position. There are too many things he doesn't know, doesn't have reliable information on. Clint really doesn't like it when he's left out of the loop, but there's no help for it at the moment. The real question is, then, why the firm wanted to get Steve away from headquarters, enough to risk a hostile intercept when their systems are having problems, ones serious enough to worry the normally unflappable Phil Coulson.

"We're being hijacked," Clint says. The car's internal cameras are still running, but there's nothing being transmitted as far as he can tell. Just recording, then, he guesses. That feels worse, gross somehow. He wouldn't put this kind of setup past the firm, not really, but he doesn't think it's SHIELD controlling the car. The answer might begin with a double agent, maybe. Maybe the guy who put them in it. He'd seen him sitting with Natasha at the canteen earlier and had waved, sent them a funny clip from an up-and-coming comedy act. Clint hopes it's not that.

Steve stiffens and starts to get out of his seat and rips the seatbelt out and hits his head. He stays half-sitting half-crouched, pressed up against the ceiling. "Can we get out?"

"The main thoroughways are electrified, so not yet. I might be able to override the locks but we need to be on to a shared-use road," Clint says. He doesn't think they've gone very far, but knows the display can't be trusted. That it could be the Asgardians flashes through his mind. Not much is known about them, and their existence isn't even common knowledge, but it doesn't make any sense to him, what they would have to gain. Captain America, sure, okay, they could be flamboyantly dressed nostalgia buffs for all he knows, but to Clint that possibility doesn't jive with the way they were talking at the gambling parlor.

"I can't tell what kind of distance we've covered," Steve says unhappily. "How much time do we have?"

They both feel the car slowing. "What about the other agents?" Steve asks, body tensing.

"I can't reach them right now. I'll try to contact the nearest group when we get out, but they'll be bogged down with that cleanup. We could be in a tight spot for a bit." He calculates the distances and transit times from headquarters to their likely location, not too far from the interchange. It's under the river. They're probably on a road somewhere on the shoreline. Clint has known people who would flood the whole underground if it meant ensuring no one would be making it in time to interfere. Contacting the babysitter teams is his best bet. Headquarters, too, but the teams there could take longer to reach them.

Clint is still in his seat. He looks up. "They're probably after you, not me, so I'm going to assume they know something about you."

"I'm sorry for the trouble."

Clint scoffs. "If you've ever seen Coulson making sad puppy eyes, you'd understand why I have to insist on taking you back in one piece."

Steve lets out the breath he's been holding in, not quite a laugh. "I reckon so," he says. The car starts really slowing down. Clint reaches down to his ankle and unstraps the band there, quickly unfolds it and pieces it together into a small, light crossbow and a set of quarrels. Steve raises an eyebrow.

"What did you think of the guns those thugs had?" Clint asks.

"I think I'd be all right."

"It only gets worse from there, not better. Don't overdo it," Clint says as the car halts. He slips a quarrel into the bow and hefts it. The crossbow is hollow, doesn't deploy much force, and doesn't get much distance. Orbit, then, inside of lacrimal. The door unlocks with a loud click.

"I'll do my best," Steve says. The door slides open and gunfire bursts through the opening. Steve steps out quickly, shielding his head and providing Clint cover as he takes aim and shoots. They rush to the other side of the car and duck their heads. There isn't as much blood as Clint expected, but it's still flowing freely down Steve's arms and his right side, staining the shirt underneath, the red edging into pink where the fabric's scrubbers are kicking in. If it were him, if it weren't for Steve taking the hits, he'd be lying in ribbons on the other side.

The bullets don't let up, battering the little car and making it shudder against their backs, but it's still a deep quiet, being cut off from a network. Clint tests his uplinks, but the interference that their attackers are running is dense stuff, like wet felt swaddled over his skin. There are four of them left standing, plastered over with fake tags, backs to their vehicle, silver and nondescript, made for medium-sized cargo. Impeccable codes. The firm would have a hard time identifying them once the car reintegrated itself into the city traffic.

"Doing all right?" Clint asks.

"Yup," Steve says. It's true, blood be damned. Clint almost laughs. "They're going to fan out before they move in," Steve says.

They need to find better cover before that happens. Clint nods. They're on a small side road, no one around. He sees a waste silo, attached to a building, at the mouth of the alleyway behind them. It connects to another road parallel to his one. It's not that far. Steve could make it. He reloads the crossbow. "I'll draw them off, you—"

He flattens himself to the ground and then gets up to run when Steve puts a shoulder to the crumpling car and _heaves_, from a running start. It happens _fast_, the car slamming into the hostile in the middle with Steve right behind, and then Steve peels off to the left and he goes to the right, shooting a quarrel deep into another eye and hurling the spent crossbow at the remaining hostile's face. Clint uses the time that buys to grab him by the forearms and twists the long, flat reflex-rifle out of his hands. It clatters onto the road. He goes for it at the same time that the hostile does and they roll, the gun between them.

The hostile punches him in the ribs and tries to push him down, get his hands around his neck, feet scrabbling on the road for purchase, but Clint finds the trigger first, his de-scramblers whirling into overdrive—he's right, it's just a cipher lock, not a biometric one, the hostiles didn't want to risk having to hand over that depth of information—and the trigger lock yields to his fingers.

Shoving a knee up between him and the hostile, Clint swings the rifle butt up to smash his nose in, kicking out with one leg and pushing himself upright with the other, twisting, and in the same arc gets the silver car in his sights and sends a spray of bullets into the control core visible through the window. Instantaneously the interference disappears and the distress signal he has ready goes through. Completing the arc, Clint recalibrates the rifle as he rolls off of the hostile into a half-crouch and shoots him through his knees and straightens, whipping around, the rifle snug against his shoulder, his arms steady, fingers relaxed. His side throbs.

Steve is holding his hostile by the collar. He makes eye contact with Clint and then drags him to the car, drops him there. Next to him the legs of the crushed hostile sticks out at sharp angles from under the wreck.

"Clear?" Steve asks.

The readouts on his lenses look good, dotted with acknowledgments from the other babysitters and requests for updated information. He doesn't detect any other hostiles. "Clear," Clint says. Steve's hostile is barely conscious, but rouses when Clint kicks him with a foot.

"Access," Clint says curtly, keeping the gun trained on his head.

The hostile grins at him through a mess of bloody teeth. "Hail Hydra." His mouth works, and then his body jerks violently and goes immediately still. Clint turns around, but he doesn't need to check, the other hostile is already dead and his insides in the process of liquefying. Probably took his pill right after Clint took the interference out. He turns back to see Steve trembling.

"_Hydra_? What—"

"_Run_," Clint says, dropping the rifle. The cargo car's self-destruct countdown activates, automatic action for when all the grunts in an active mission have been killed or have died. Have become defunct, in _their_ parlance. It's almost predictable, Hydra's M.O. Why do they even bother with a countdown? Because they're a cabal of perverts, that's what. The firm even installs and maintains a special detector for this very situation. The mechanism is at that moment swamping his senses with loud, obnoxious warning signals. "Just—"

Steve rushes to him as the car explodes, the upcurrent of the blast catching them up, and they fly through the air in a crush of heat and bounce off of a building, or Steve does, anyway. The impact travels through Clint's bones, short-circuits all his senses with pain, white-hot.

He's not going to remember this later, but he falls into the pain and then into a dream, a rush of kingfisher feathers, beaks skimming the water, wings breaking on the surface tension, jeweled fish scattering beneath a bird's shadow, printed across the water in gold leaf, in curliques, pretty curves. A string somewhere twangs, the sound of a fiddle giving up the ghost, voiced oddly deep. His circuitmaster thwacks the unhaired bow against the tent glass, yelling something about quotas, practice, _smile_, the girls' cut and the best seats, locomotion, chemosensors, microphonics. Their afterimages spin him around, shake up his tracks, hand him a ticket for the way out, crumpled and sticky with sweat, mulberry paper as thin as a mosquito's wing. An alarm somewhere buzzes and a chemical cue to wake up unfurls in the base of his neck.

He must have passed out for a bit, some number of clicks; he wakes up prone, feeling like he's been tossed into an ore crusher, but the readings for his vitals on his lenses are not that bad, considering. The miracle of high-end painkillers, protein-based nanopedes, heavenly sickbay, rewiring. Having a superhuman shield probably helped. A notification informs him that he is currently occupying a recuperation module in MedTech following a medical evac. _Medical evac_. Clint almost groans. He checks the rest of his messages, lingers on the important one: Debriefing timeslot to be assigned. He opens his eyes. Steve startles, looks down at him from a bench beside the bed, singed and only a little beat up. Accelerated healing au naturel, Clint remembers. They've given him a new jacket, same as before, and a shirt in a shade cooler that washes him out. It goes with the haggard face.

"Hey there. Agent Coulson stopped by."

"He would."

"And—Natasha?"

"Did she bring me flowers?"

"No flowers."

Clint carefully raises himself up, scooting back in the bed using his elbows. They don't hurt. On his body are brand-new clothes, in his head are perfectly repaired lenses and aural implants. There are patches of graft wrapped around his left arm and wrist; in a few decaclicks the edges of the new skin won't even show. The time when this would have been unimaginable seems as distant as the explosion and just as close. He feels it. An eternity, silence. It's just discombobulation. He should be used to it, but. Clint blinks to try to get rid of the feeling and swings his legs out of the bed. Steve looks at him with concern.

"You're all right?"

"MedTech's given me the clear," Clint replies as he tests his weight, toes on the floor. There's a pair of shoes next to the bed, also new. He pauses, groggy a tad. "I don't really like being..."

"Out of commission?"

"Offline."

Steve, baffled, nods.

He wasn't out that long, but it wasn't so brief that he can imagine Steve being willing to have been sitting there the entire time. "What have _you_ been up to?"

"Drawing," Steve says. His amusement shines clearly through even the thick layers of strain in his face. "Apparently 'the data is obfuscated.' Folks wanted to know what the aliens looked like."

That explains at least one of the verifying tasks flagged for Clint's attention. Not the Director's imminent visit, though. It's not for him, Clint gathers. He leans against the edge of the bed, and then thinks better of it and sits on it instead. The wave of dizziness passes and an alert lands in his notifications. Clint gets comfortable. If the Director wanted to have a private conversation with their super soldier, he would, unusual personal visit to sickbay not required. He's fine where he is.

Steve stands when he enters the module. "Director Fury."

"Captain." He nods at Clint, who nods back with a "Sir."

"I've just come back from a meeting with Central," the Director says. "As I understand it, the timetable to make your recovery public is still under review, but once we have the details ironed out, I think we should be able to get moving on a short-term visa for you."

Clint somehow doubts it. The firm burned a lot of bridges to secure Steve Rogers and get him out, left more than a few bodies in its wake, not that he's likely to be told as much. Nick Fury is a good man, not a decent one. Clint doesn't see anyone chomping at the bit to get a hard-won asset back in that mess. Central, or even the World Security Council—which world? whose world? what a lethal barrel of laughs they were—could be the least of their problems in terms of what Steve seems to have asked for.

"Appreciate it, sir."

"The planet has changed a lot since your time."

"I've seen the fi— holos," Steve says. A muscle in his neck bunches. "I understand that."

"I'm glad to hear it. Just let Coulson know if you have any concerns. If you'll excuse me—"

"What can you tell me about—" Steve starts to say, only to be interrupted.

"They're not the same organization that you remember fighting," the Director says.

"I'll _learn_."

"I appreciate your willingness to help, but you have a lot of catching up to do. Let's just take it one step at a time," the Director says evenly. His tone is final. Steve looks like he's going to say something different, but grits out, "Sir." Director Fury glances at Clint.

"Feeling better?"

"Doing fine, Director."

"Take a few more clicks," he says, and then nods at them as he strides out. Clint pulls his legs back up on the bed and sits cross-legged against the headboard. Someone left him a display arm next to the bed, clipped to the molded edge of the frame, Coulson, probably. He pulls it up and then down, parallel to the surface of the bed. Steve is radiating frustration and something else, less obvious, but sits back down. "What do you know about them?" he demands.

That they're one of the nastiest and longest-lived organizations there is, even if far from the only game in town. "They've got heads and roots," Clint says. The various transit authorities, for instance, corrupt and capable. Or the shady research arms of Central, even.

"I—"

"I'm not anybody you have to convince," Clint reminds him.

"Just a goon, is that right?" Steve says harshly.

"On a tether, that's right," Clint replies.

Steve quiets. "Didn't look so good back there."

Clint is reviewing the data as he speaks, the list of medical interventions that is getting added to his personnel file, Coulson's comments, MedTech's. It could have been worse, he's known a lot worse. The blackbox protocols embedded into his lenses hum agreement, still present. "SHIELD takes care of its investments," he attests. "And never underestimate the Coulson effect."

The joke is terrible, completely flat, but Steve makes an obliging sound anyway. He stays silent while Clint brings his reports up on the display, briefly letting his eyes rest. He doesn't say anything while Clint is commonplacing marks into the incident report, already rubricated with corrections from Review. Clint adds his jottings to the document and sends it back. He downloads the next report waiting in queue while seeing if there is any new information on one of the firm's local intranets that might help him figure out what's really going on.

More reports come through his connection, among them a truncated summary of Natasha's last mission; one of the dead is a known associate of one of his. The firm has tangled with the group once before, a relative newcomer to the business, in a joint security effort with Lunar. It's no wonder that Natasha was in a bad mood, to have powered through three operettas in a row. Lunar is a cesspool, though far from the worst; that distinction still belongs to Earth Central. No other transit authority is as merciless when it comes to curbing the rare species trade, protecting the remaining wild populations, and deterring the trophy hunters, collectors and adventurers enticed by sighting rumors of rare or supposedly extinct creatures of all kinds, large and small. Orchids, conches, voles and so on, though it's not a long list. The gene cartels based Earthside and the regional water consortiums can be even more brutal when it comes to their turf. A case of true macro-level symbiosis. Clint has seen his share of smugglers on the wrong side left high and dry. Some runner breathing his last while a rival extracts from him a live queen wasp, tranquilized inside a tiny suspension box, disguised as an swollen lymph node but not quite convincingly enough, some kid promised a lion's share for moving roe, glittering unperturbed inside their cold cases in his entrails while someone rips his torso open, some stupid fuck pouring out his lifeblood for a packet of amino acid sequences sewn into his skin. Clint sends the second report and then an acknowledgment of communication received.

"Coulson is swinging back to pick you up," he says. The higher-ups and Coulson don't think it was an inside job. The relief feels better than any painkiller could.

"What about you?"

"More reports." Clint indicates the display holding the projections he's starting to run. With a series of twitches in his fingers he reactivates his lenses so that he can refer to what he submits if needed. "A low-level infiltration job I'm being consulted on. Pushers," he says. There's a new popular stimulant making the rounds, a psychoactive gel you apply to your lower lid with a pinky. "Illegal pharma distributors," he explains, a particular subset who are selling glamour as much as a high.

"Looks interesting," Steve says, gamely following along.

"This is the cool part," Clint says. It's slightly disorienting, the superfluous information in his field of vision thanks to the image displayed for Steve's benefit, doubled on his lenses. He slides the third report towards the middle of the screen.

"This guy is the pin. Take him out and the chain folds," Clint tells Steve. He submits the report, an ID'd copy to Forecast and a blind copy to Review, and then refreshes the screen, now showing a copy threaded through with those departments' respective watermarks. He points to links epsilon and eta and timelapses everything to a projection post-event. One end of the chain collapses, bringing the two links together. "Here. With his mover gone, epsilon has to get in direct contact with eta to make sure the material clears border control. Eta is us," Clint's shoulders shrug up a notch, "sort of. Sub-contractor, not my call. But Forecast gives us at least 80% for making a positive ID, so once we've got epsilon, we can triangulate our approach to these," Clint says, indicating the upper links, scattered about the projection in gray. Unlike the lower links, they're blank, data yet insufficient to clearly identify the real movers and shakers at the top of the organization's food chain.

Steve studies the diagram from where he's sitting. "How are you taking out epsilon?"

"Maybe kill, maybe not," Clint answers. Of the two departments Review is most likely to side with his recommendation, Forecast he's not sure about. The people there don't like him, but Clint doesn't hold that against them; it's their job to be gloomy and his track record is nothing if not reasons.

"Is that you?"

"Hm," Clint replies.

"Do they put you on a lot of these?"

"I don't do a lot of fieldwork," Clint says, deflecting. He folds the display arm back and gets out of the bed to put his shoes on. "I'm usually put on projects to do risk assessment, value-added analysis, credentialing, patternrec, that kind of stuff."

"Seems contrariwise."

Clint stretches. "I suppose that's you calling me a liar, but hate to break it to you, this is a spy agency I'm being a cog in."

"A spy with a crossbow," Steve remarks.

"Doesn't register on most deep scanners, makes it handy," Clint says. "I do have a couple of fancy bows, composites," he adds. "With whistles and so forth."

"Quiet compared to those newfangled guns, I imagine," Steve says, giving him a look that might have been inscrutable to anyone else, but Clint has had this conversation before. He has known and the firm knows, no matter how far ahead technology leaps forward, certain situations still respond best to the application of old-fashioned mechanics.

"I've always liked bows," Clint responds easily. "Saw it in the holos all the time, growing up. A lot of war stories. World War movies, too."

Steve's expression flickers. "Oh."

"Yeah, like the archery platoons. Thought that was the greatest thing when I was a kid."

Steve's mouth opens and closes like he's a goldfish. "We didn't use bows," he says in dismay. "We used—" he starts to add, then his face goes kerploot between the twin forces of disbelief and hysteria, maybe there was something there more tricksome, like memory, and he falls over on the bench, laughing so hard that he's starting to cry, and then he's laughing until he's just crying, sobs bellowing his chest, blood-splintered sounds. It isn't the kind of thing a stranger should witness, not that it would be any more right if a man were to find himself dead alone in the vacuum of space. Clint wants to leave, but Steve Rogers has been put in his charge and he's supposed to—be nice. Keep him from zapping himself off to Jove's moons, from hurting himself or others, something like that. The mission brief had been unhelpfully vague on the particulars. Clint puts aside a swell of ill feeling towards the irreproachable honorable upstanding no-good Phil Coulson. He's the big fan though, and Clint wonders if seeing his hero break down and weep wouldn't just break him, too. In their line of work hearts are about the only thing they can carry around that's their own. Not faces, not names, secrets least of all. Coulson probably knew exactly what he was doing.

Clint is still a little pissed off for being given a task that's out of the range of his skill set, but he's the one who got himself into this particular situation and he's the one who's going to have to get himself out. "I was just dicking around about World War Two. Did sort of flunk history though," he says. "Sorry."

Steve spits a breath out from between clenched teeth. "Forget it," he says. Pressed against his knees, his hands ball into fists, and his shoulders above his head tighten from the effort of trying to suffocate the tremors quaking him, shut out the gulps of air slicing him through. Clint knows the feeling, pretending that it all belongs to someone else. Pretending it's all someone else, somewhere else, wishing, despairing.

"I actually learned to shoot in the circus," he tells him. Steve looks up, his face a blotchy mess, incredulous and simmering with anger.

"Honest," Clint says, fingers loose, limbs loose, and feet flat on the floor, even though his instincts are yelling at him to get the hell out of there instead of making it worse. You guys are no good either, he thinks. "Used to be in an act. When I was a kid." Clint mimics drawing back a bowstring, both eyes closed. "I could shoot flies out of the air blindfolded."

"Bullshit."

Clint opens his eyes and pauses. "They were big flies," he admits, lowering his arms. "From the elephant stalls. Bet you I could still do it."

Steve snorts. A bit of the tension is gone and Clint relaxes a little to match. "Do flies even exist anymore?" Steve asks. "I'd have thought we'd be chasing away flying rats from trash cans by now. I wouldn't be surprised if I saw an elephant in the sky."

Clint decides to tell him about genetically modified flora and fauna and the sequencing cold wars later. "Don't know about those," he says instead.

"I really wouldn't," Steve says, sounding tired. "Damn it." He drags a sleeve over his eyes, wrist-side in. "I must look a mess."

Clint assesses him. "You look like the ugliest Sleeping Beauty to have ever lived," he says.

"I think that would make Nick Fury the Prince," Steve mumbles.

"Rogers, in the future we call that a one-way ticket to a court marshal."

Steve puts his head down again. "I'm going to start laughing the minute I see him next," he says, this time shaking with mirth.

"At least you've got a good cover. Time-travel-induced cultural differences."

"Thanks, I'll use that," Steve says, subsiding. He raises his head. "It's like I'm back in grammar school," he says, leaning back against the wall of the sickbay module. The red at the edges of his eyes and the flush in his cheeks have disappeared already. "They act like I'm gonna—"

Clint watches him bite down on what he was going to say next, change it into a question.

"Where are you headed?"

"I'm back on the meeting schedule," Clint says sourly. _Coulson_. He looks him over. "You want to ditch the schoolmarms and hang out while I do the rest of my reports?"

"Captain America? Play hooky?"

"Loki was right—you're a crook," Clint says to that faintly scandalized face. Steve flips him a finger, mild expression intact. Clint jabs his head towards the doors. "Let's go before Coulson catches us."

"You're that worried?"

"You wouldn't believe the kinds of people that guy is capable of sneaking up on," Clint says, leading the way, a little slower than usual, but Steve doesn't make a mention of it. Clint's muscles feel like they're tied up with string, pulling his limbs just slightly out of alignment, a side effect of the boosters pumping through his vascular system and making repairs to the damage from the blast, but it's just as well that they don't have to go too far. Their first stop is Research, right next to MedTech, one of the main workstations arrayed around that department's central atrium, lined with low-iron glass and ceramic tiles, the sweeping arches broken up with greenery. Sitwell is there, chatting with one of the department's newer recruits while sipping tea from a mug. He nods at Clint and Steve when they enter and slides a unprocessed report, the specs on one of the local push outfits the firm has been monitoring, over to Clint. The formatting of the raw data makes him frown.

"Their systems manager just upgraded their end-user interface," Pollack, the bright-eyed newcomer staffing the workstation, says.

"There was nothing wrong with their old one."

"According to our informer, orders from the top. Apparently wanted 'more pizzazz and bouncy things.' " Sitwell supplies.

Clint pulls the specs to his lenses and looks them over. "Those assholes."

Sitwell—the hands-on type, good head on his shoulders—says, "Forecast is calculating a 34% drop in their productivity levels for the next two kiloclicks. Means easier time for us."

"Peh," Clint says. It's the principle of the thing.

Sitwell tips his mug in Steve's direction. "Brain trust says, no hard feelings."

"I'm glad to hear that," Steve stiffly replies.

"Those carrels were supposed to be replaced soon in any case. Our re-syncs with the backups are almost done," Pollack says. "Here are the summaries you wanted, Agent Sitwell."

"Following extensive review of recent events, we've restructured how we're doing research on your era," Sitwell tells Steve in a tone that is meant to reassure. "Complete revamp. MedTech thinks we can jimmy up a prosthetic you can use instead." He peers over Pollack's shoulder to scan the workstation bar. " 'Contacts.' Neat."

"Jimmy up?" Clint asks.

"Some of us are doing lingo too while we're at it," Pollack tells him, "dawg. Homies."

Steve stares at him. "I'm not sure if I've ever heard that."

Pollack's expression turns sheepish. "Fine-tuning the caches will take a while, but don't you worry Captain, everyone's is going to be reset up to speed so you feel more comfortable. We'll hack you a ridonkulous set-param in your contacts fo sho."

"...Thanks..."

"Oh yeah, Barton, you've got new All-Speak data?" Sitwell says.

"Pull up my playback all you like on those jerks, if you get anything it'll be them squabbling," Clint replies, authorizing an audio transfer to Sitwell with a flick of his wrist through the scanner sphere at the end of Pollack's workstation. Pollack surveys the transfer with interest.

"A lot of people really want to know how it works," he tells Steve. He lowers his voice. "I think a couple of the recent meltdowns in upper div have something to do with it."

"Keep up the good work," Clint tells Pollack, snipping the conversation in the bud before it has the chance to spool out of control. "Sitwell."

Sitwell gazes meditatively into his empty mug. "We're going to the canteen," Clint tells him.

"I'll walk with you," he says. He waves goodbye to Pollack, who barely notices them leaving, already absorbed by the designs up on his screens and the task of reverse-engineering Steve to fit into their reality.

Clint and Sitwell fall into a casual pace. MedTech teams pass them by, and for the most part most of them do an acceptable job of pretending that Steve is just another part of the scenery, rather than asking for a picture together or screaming and tripping the alarm. For his part, Steve just looks forward. Clint imagines that he's imagining himself being a piece of moving furniture. The autopedal footpath seems to gratify him, at least. He studies the walkway, eyebrows drawn together.

"Anything new on the situation?" Clint asks.

"Hydra must have known about them," Sitwell comments. Steve's attention snaps back.

"Maybe. Doesn't mean they were working together. I think the Asgardians were—sightseeing," Clint says. "They didn't seem hostile."

"I heard from Agent Coulson that Agent Hill didn't like your report," Sitwell says. "What's your take?" he asks Steve, ruefully. "I'm afraid the aliens have become the big news. Though of course everyone is relieved that you and Agent Barton are all right."

Steve pauses. "I'm not sure. They seemed...haphazard."

"They're geniuses at cards, that's for sure," Clint comments.

"She _really_ didn't like that part, Coulson said," Sitwell says. "Maybe they're here to fleece the city's crime lords of their hard-earned fortunes," he says thoughtfully.

"What about Hydra?" Steve asks, a touch impatient.

"You were the target, we think. Our information is still developing. But if it was a leak at our end, it's serious," Sitwell replies. "We'll find out what's going on," he tells Steve, confident.

"Hell of a grudge," Steve mutters.

"You must have made an impression," Sitwell says with a smile as they reach the canteen. He spots the hot-water carafes. "See you later, Barton. I'll keep you updated. Captain."

Clint waves him goodbye and spots Natasha at the far end of the canteen. "Agent Romanoff," he says as he sits on the other side of her table. Steve drags a chair over and murmurs a hello. She breaks her concentration and transfers her attention to the two of them. "Hello. Looking good, Agent Barton."

He catches himself preening and translates it into a shrug. It's a long game between them, acceptable distance contoured with feints and plays, though sometimes she slips augurs and sybils and tarots into the mix. He's come to accept that Natasha Romanoff doesn't fight fair. It's okay; he doesn't, either.

"Thought you'd be gone already."

"I deploy soon," Natasha says. Clint doesn't comment on how she put in for a delay in her schedule. Problems at Terminal could just as well explain. Steve nods.

"What's the mission, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Live retrieval. Person of interest," Natasha replies. She looks up at Steve through her lashes. "He's kind of squirrelly," she says, intent on something on her lenses. Her attention shifts back. "I like your drawings."

"Nothing really," Steve says. "Where are you headed?"

"Lunar, first," Natasha answers. "Runner network scaledown followup. How were Deimos queues when you came in?" she asks Clint.

"Like molasses," Clint recalls, and then feels a hand on his shoulder. He looks up. "Hi."

"Sickbay," Coulson orders.

Clint gets up and pushes his chair back in. "You weren't kidding," Steve jokes, wan.

"I never kid," Clint quips back. He hears Coulson ask Natasha to mind Steve, not in those words, before she leaves on her mission as he's making his way out of the canteen to dutifully march back to MedTech. Steve is sure to have more questions about Hydra. The preliminary reports from the botched robbery point to someone behind the scenes contracting the thugs, with no clear lines of investigation yet, the tracks meticulously erased, footprints on water. It might be Hydra, but they can't rule anything out, and only more questions fill up the interim. Clint can't think of anyone better to not to answer them than Natasha, give Steve a crash course on the rules and how things work. No place better than the firm, he supposes, for anyone wanting to transition into a world of constant war from a world of total war, not that Steve has much choice in the matter, less than most.

The next few decaclicks pass quickly—he sleeps some so that the nanopedes and -reprogrammers can really do their thing, but a big portion of his time in mandatory bed rest is spent catching up on work that has piled up during his nonexistent vacation, poring over fixed-asset inventories for the Phobos III supply line project. Its legal department is a veritable labyrinth, but the station regulators are punctual in providing transaction details, thankfully. Payouts from the discretionary budget that the firm has assigned him for the project helps. He submits his schedules for several of the reverse auctions the firm has been tracking planetwide, labor pools and pipe fittings and bauxite, pursues a low bid on one of them, sends it for appraisal through Review. He has to try to avoid nudging the resources in the wrong direction, but one needs to leave lures enough in honeypots if they're going to be honeypots, and meanwhile on top of everything else Clint finds himself swamped with the running of failure analyses regarding his pleasant outing with a certain super solder, check, vetting the asymmetry indicators set on SHIELD's active exchanges on the Central commodities indices, lobbing collateral at the right wrong people, making recommendations to Forecast for deploying fixed assets and jettisoning dead weight from the system as need be, all the while scouring the firm's intranet for irregularities that shouldn't be there as opposed the odd tics the system allows. They're easily overlooked, those places where an excess of wrinkles obscure a real canker. He wasn't lying to Steve, exactly, these kinds of projects constitute the bulk of his work, but what he's actually supposed to be doing is going on vacation—Clint schemes ways to rectify the matter but mostly racks up points with Review by getting in a record number of reports on deadline without his usual—"Insightful," Hill has a habit of saying, as dry as the under-terraformed parts of the Martian landscape—commentary.

In the places where he's connected up, the firm's networks are awash in incident reports and verification requests and intel waiting to be sorted and processed. Clint is linked in a web made of queues linking researchers and analysts the same as everyone else, waiting for data products, outputting evals, keeping track of billable work, alternately scrubbing and soldering boilerplate. The newsfeeds report that Stark is starting to make his move against his company board. He's arriving in Two for a series of stockholder meetings. According to the firm's indicators there seem to be small flare-ups along the various chains of command at Stark Industries—nothing concrete, most of the people the firm currently has at SI are on the lower rungs, now that Natasha's cover has outlived its usefulness. Clint monitors the incoming information from at a distance, in digests, to supplement his intel on the supply line project. Some of the reports coming in, even sourced from the lower levels, sound anxious: some of SI's disgruntled business partners are wasting no time unloading discontinued small arms into the delicate ecosystem of black-market weapons markets, and Stark has barely touched his stockpiles, let alone liquidated the least of them.

Never has one man's near-extinction event resulted in so much hand-wringing from people living it up in circles usually buffered from changes in the interstellar tides, but the rest of them have jobs to keep them busy, not empires to dismantle and rebuild into a disquieting shape. As promised, Sitwell passes along a progress report on the investigation into the Hydra hijackers over the transom. It's missing big chunks in the middle and confirms for Clint that the higher-ups don't want Steve underfoot, but only slightly less than they don't want Hydra getting ahold of an asset. Clint picks out through the tangle and makes recommendations for a handful of leads for the analysts to prioritize. He lingers over the part of the report that says that based strictly on the codes, the Hydra unit wasn't sitting there waiting, they'd diverged from a as-of-yet undetermined position to intercept. The contents of their vehicle are too mangled to make much out of, but strangely, there doesn't seem to have been much inside in the first place other than backup weapons. Other than bits of twisted metal, the clean-up crew reports an abundance of charcoal residue. An odd detail from the report catches his attention: hazel twigs in the lining of their armored jackets. The background check on the robbers indicates that they are, in all respects, ordinary criminal elements, but Clint is informed that the analysts are going to continue every avenue of investigation into their possible connections with Hydra. He thinks it's not going to turn up anything, Review makes a note of it, and the info loop closes to him except for on a need-to-know or courtesy basis. Clint likes coincidences as much as any other agent, which is to say, not at all, but it seems to him to fit. Review makes a note of that, too.

His schedule stays full but Clint keeps windows open for occasional breaks, like Steve stopping by, a bevy of MedTech researchers in tow who have rigged him up with bands that stretch over each of his thumbs and fingertips. They tried, but MedTech can't find a good way to splice them directly into his nerves, Steve says, high pain tolerance notwithstanding. The thin, self-adhering bands just rest on top of his skin like a second skin, and without the direct links the range of commands the prostheses are capable of are severely limited. Clint considers it akin to having canes glued to the ends of one's fingers and predictably the setup gives Steve trouble.

Once, Pollack stops by at the same time, ostensibly to get Steve's input on "the lingo" but really to snoop for information on the aliens and the All-Speak he might have missed out on. Clint doesn't mind, the new recruit has a fresh take on what works and what doesn't. In the conversation Pollack explains, while dodging pointed comments from the MedTech reps and in language peppered with archaisms, that the interfaces people used back then were made of separable, moving mechanical and chemical parts. He shows Clint his notes, but even so, it's hard to imagine. The Captain isn't used to people gesturing so much, and so bizzarely, Pollack says, and Steve makes a sound, emphatic; Clint imagines people standing still while talking to each other, unenveloped by data, and is weirded out. If all of that was invisible and intangible to Steve before, though, Clint can understand, sort of, when he says that he thought they were all crazy at first. He learns that Steve is completely spooked by the lack of physical signage around the city, too. His condition has improved after he's been fitted with the prosthetic lenses, little circles of flexible, porous plastic—refined out of a sealogged hunk of the stuff kept in the firm's materia terra vault—that slide right over the pupil and iris, but Clint hears him say that he misses street signs, prompting Pollack to point out how almost everything still bears a physical label, it's obvious, a matter of forthright redundancy—but Steve replies, "It's not the same," and everyone within hearing range for a single moment is longing for it too, that alien city gone and past.

When Clint's clean bill of health finally attracts all the right signatures, he's in the middle of doing upkeep on one of his main long-term covers, a mid-level urban planner at one of the city's satellite offices. It's a good one as these things go, gives him a lot of excuses for wandering around town with surveying tools, take sudden research and professional development trips, maintain contacts in various bureaucratic and management bodies. Steve finds the work interesting, and on his downtime from training bouts with Natasha and sessions with MedTech sits with Clint while he works on the cover. There is nothing particularly sensitive about its functions, and Coulson lets him know in a memo that the Director thinks it's a good idea, getting Steve more familiar with the city. It's something to keep him occupied while lounging around MedTech and making the people in the department nervous by playing host to Steve, which suits Clint just fine.

There are two other SHIELD agents posted to the fake office, anchors who actually do the fake job Clint is supposed to be doing as well as help him gather and crunch the data for keeping his cover viable. He introduces Wise, one of those agents, via audioscreen to Steve and visa versa. His and Wise's backup is a supernumerary who actually maintains a presence at the physical office, an artfully dingy and cramped rental unit near Terminal, but in practice is only there during off-hours and during emergencies. His corner of the tiny office, also home to their vintage lidar and a triple-beam balance with a mind of its own, is currently buried under crates of soil samples waiting to be processed. Clint tosses the sample inventory to Wise and flips the heavy metal graphs down at the bottom of his display to the top of the shared part of the audioscreen, obscuring a chart labeled 'Gastropods and Nematodes.' Clint frowns at the latest readings crawling across his display. "I don't like these numbers."

"We're still under fifty for lead, Barton."

"Parts per mega," Clint tells Steve, sitting nearby, who nods and asks, "How do you get that?"

"The city runs sensor networks underground in the permasoft," Clint answers, "but we do independent random sampling on top of that every quarter cycle. And keep an eye on how the snails are doing, they're a good indicator species."

"Snails is not a species, Barton."

"Yes they are," Clint tells her, "and ants." To Steve he says, "Don't let Agent Wisecracker here jerk you around."

A corner of Steve's mouth quirks up. "All right."

"We've got someone for the ants," Clint continues.

"Don't forget, swarming season is coming up," Wise says, quoting their consultant. "Better keep an eye on those _hybrid colonies_."

"He's a character," Clint says.

"What are these files over here?" Steve asks, peering at a corner of the screen.

"Expenditure and reimbursement forms. In double triplicate," Wise says heavily.

"Good to know bureaucracy is eternal," Steve observes. Clint amens. He sends Wise the latest guidelines issued by the city regarding soil management and a review of new substrate waterscaping techniques being given trial runs in the Hudson watershed. Negotiations for the city to annex more of the Hudson system are stalled, meanwhile several of Two's basin managers are chattering about sourcing water ice from Mercury Fed or the Enceladus conglomerates instead of extracting it from the poles, price-fixing pipe dreams, probably. Clint asks Wise to keep an eye on it and send him an update later, just for kicks. She passes along some interesting news, the development of a few promising signs of corruption in the city's transpiration credit exchange—promising, because the firm hasn't had much luck finding the right kind of pressure points in the city's water bureau yet. One of those just-in-cases. She also fills him in on the latest on Blake's moneypit, and the three of them spend the last part of the meeting critiquing his plans to add faux-mahogany moldings and absinthe-green wallpaper to his study.

After the meeting Clint checks out of the sickbay, sending Steve on ahead to the canteen while he goes through MedTech's discharge protocols, and as he clears their controls, a call from Coulson almost immediately comes through, directing him to explain more of the future to Steve Rogers, especially the parts about thermonuclearastrophysics, another one of those old-fangled words making the rounds at headquarters courtesy of Pollack.

Clint looks the gloss up in the firm's databank, the entry helpfully provided by the firm's researchers. "But that's not my field."

"Precisely."

He is, in fact, the opposite of an expert on the list of topics Coulson assigns, which is probably partly why he's volunteered him. Clint makes his way to the canteen. When he gets there, he's not quite sure why Natasha is there with him, sharing a plate of whey and crackers and playing virtual go, other than to be entertained by the proceedings. "Updating the Captain on weapons and defense systems before my departure" is an excuse, he's completely sure. During his lunch, Clint hits all of the targeted topics in turn and the conversation proceeds swimmingly, until it swings back to Natasha's imminent trip to Lunar and how she's going to get there.

"The way I learned it is that through controlled propellant fusion we're de-aliasing the plane orientation of two different but compatible sets of spacetime axes to fix a stable window of quantum transfer. But just in our neighborhood, no one has developed a long-range stabilization method yet."

"Huh," Steve says.

"Right now a window can't be maintained for more than the half-life of a click, but it's theorized that the more efficiently the propellant catalyzes the transfer, the shorter the half-life of the window, which might have the effect of extending the range of axes species we can access. This from what might be the best current model approximating how it actually works, from what we know of it, which isn't much. Other models out there, but I don't really keep track of this stuff," Clint says, and sits back in his chair. A painful silence descends on the table.

"Since you've been gone we've achieved local interplanetary travel, no seatbelts necessary," Natasha finally says.

"Good enough for me," Steve says, firm. After a pause, he asks, "So there aren't any space ships?"

"They're more like boxes," Clint answers, conciliatory.

"I see."

At that, Natasha comes to Clint's rescue again and herds them to the one of the training halls—but only because she lost her game and has time to kill before her transport is ready, is his guess. Along with the handful of other agents there Clint watches the two of them spar for a while, Steve with his bizarre, seamless body and Natasha in all her indivisible befores and afters. She asks him questions while delivering sweeping roundhouse kicks and vicious left-hand hooks, casual, friendly, easy, but Clint and the other agents gathered around to watch know better. Her hits don't land as hard as his, but knowledge is what she's aiming for, what she flenses from her opponents with a smile and what she walks away with while they're still wondering why the pressure in their veins is dropping. She makes Clint think that it could be so easy, anything, everything. The match ends in an unspoken draw, neither of them having gone all out, but Clint is impressed that Steve didn't clock out when Natasha went for his jugular in tandem with a direct hack, or when she landed a body punch alongside a rapid-fire lense burst, and those were just the ones that she let them see.

"Have to work on that," Natasha tells him, "but better."

Steve grimaces, holding his arms at his sides in a way that makes it clear he's trying his best not to rub his eyes. "Thanks."

Natasha tips her head to one side. "I'll be working on," she flexes the fingers on her right side. "Good match."

Steve demurs.

"I think a switchboard will help you," she says as she starts to digest the fight. "With the right kind of synchro." Natasha wriggles a thumb at the corner of one eye. "An extra layer." She looks at Clint. "The kid—"

"Pollack."

"Pollack will hook you up," Natasha says. "Dampers also. Priority," she says to the newbie agent, who chirrups a 'copy' back to her from his workstation.

"You're just saying that 'cause you want to try hitting him with a sound wall," Clint says.

Natasha smiles up at Steve. "Yes?"

"I'll be ready," he replies.

"No closing your eyes next time," Natasha says.

Steve brings his hands up, palms out. She nods, satisfied. It's not as though SHIELD agents don't train under adverse conditions or in simulations of worst-case scenarios, which include blackouts and massive interference events, but the higher-ups have decided that the sooner Steve can navigate his space with something approaching normalcy, the better, especially given that he's become completely unresponsive to the exchange mediums used in rewiring. Steve leaves MedTech scratching their collective heads and clamoring at the analysts and researchers to find them as much information as they can on his inventor. That isn't the right designation for Erskine, Clint and Natasha agree, but they argue about which promethean word to employ in its stead, and Steve choose to stay mum on the subject of his remaking except to say in passing:

"As I were," and neither he nor Natasha finds much to add to that.

They disband temporarily to clean up and regroup to see Natasha off—the firm has re-prioritized her mission schedule so that she's assigned runners and smugglers again, headed back to Lunar's bosom. Natasha has an in with Lermentov, one of the big brokers based there. Lermentov and his cronies, for all their outsize footprint on Lunar, are small fry, Natasha says on the way, in snatches of conversation, her attention occupied by mission specs. She's going in by herself but as far as Clint can tell, she seems cheerful about it. The other, forestalled mission is damn near impossible, anyway, if Central's spectacular failures are anything to go by. "Squirrelly," Natasha says from deep within her web. Such is a spider's ambition, Clint muses.

"So you're going to flush out whoever is at the top?" Steve asks.

"Maybe," Natasha says. "Diagnose first."

"Weak spots."

Natasha nods. "Problems among the brokerages, message traffic uptick around. Shortfall somewhere along the network, I think. Lermentov will have to do outreach."

"Account must've gotten thin," Clint says to himself, going through the expenditures report that Natasha is giving him copy access to. "Who cleaned them out?" he asks, expanding a spike in the timeline.

"Dummy agencies."

"Oh, us."

"Just one of them. Less important," Natasha says. "Vectors point outwards so I'll go see who the employer is."

"No time wasted on the fellas pulling short cons, huh," Steve says, wry.

Natasha shrugs. She writes a figure into the air with a ring finger. "Those. Bread bits for birds, you know. Crumbs, I follow. End trail, witch jaws, wolves." Her attention shifts again, subtly. "There we are."

They arrive at the checkpoint before the lower garage complex where large mobile equipment is kept, a labyrinth of self-directed stacking pods, control columns, and a veritable forest of jointed booms and cranes cantilevered over the edge of the garage platform. There should be fewer techs staffing the area thanks to the repairs still going on, but to Clint's eyes, the level of activity at the complex appear almost normal. At the main platform, the transport management sweeps them for irregularities and then issues them a set of tags each. A car, codes percolating over its resin skin, dodges around the moving machine arms and storage modules to slide to a halt in front of them. Natasha's demeanor changes entire as she steps into the cover just as smoothly as she enters the car. Clint feels more than he sees Steve startle next to him. What he doesn't know is that everything in Natasha is a cover; what even many of the people at the firm don't realize is that her genius is that they're always, every one of them, herself and genuine, because she understands, right down to marrow, that lies need a core of truth. It should frighten him, how effortless she makes it seem, but Clint finds himself admiring instead.

"It was good catching up with you, Agent Barton," Natasha says from her seat as she sends Clint a few handling tips over a private channel and a curious tip out to the techs to discreetly program Steve's shirts and slacks and bedlinens to stay rumpled until they go in the disinfectant bin. "And Captain, best of luck with your readjustment. Don't forget you promised me a rematch. I quite look forward to it."

"Won't forget it," Steve says, recovering. It occurs to Clint that later, if the firm allows them more downtime, he ought to take him to one of the wholesale bazaars down on 486th that sells vintage clothes and consignment from the city's glitterati class. Much love for the purported past to be found there, Steve would be bound to find something he recognized.

"See you when you get back, Agent Romanoff," Clint says. Natasha gives him a smile as the door shuts. The car glides down the length of the platform and into a shunt that'll take it to Terminal. Another car moves up towards them, identical to the one before, except that this one is fitted with ballistics. Clint had insisted. "Time for me to go combat inertia," he says to Steve. The fake office is secure, but now and then, it still needs some tender loving care to look vaguely occupied and functional.

"Mind if I come along?" Steve asks, and Clint runs the request by Coulson. Hydra might still be gunning for Steve and the firm's intel is still incomplete, but the response he gets isn't a no. From the signals that he's getting from the higher-ups, Clint thinks they're actually being serious about integrating Steve back into society at large. It seems to him an under-utilization of resources after all the trouble they went to, snatching him from right under Central's nose.

"Sure," Clint says. There are a few excellent food courts near that particular office block; it would be nice to have company while eating lunch. The garage crew fits a case into the underside of one of the seats, bolts it down, and fits a folding panel over the space to hide it from view.

"Keister for your bows?" Steve asks. "Kit," he clarifies, pointing at the case at Clint's blank look.

"Scannable weapons will trigger the foams. Most of Terminal's deep scanners are hardwired and networked locally in clusters, so we'd have to hack each one separately."

"A hassel," Steve says.

"Something like," Clint guesses. He returns the inventory check and the motor-car gets a clear from the garage, and the two of them get tags to match so that they don't inadvertently commit any zone infractions. Clint checks out a gun optimized for the city's scanner grid and they enter the car, the doors seal, and Clint proceeds to distract Steve from dwelling on what happened the last time they were in a car by showing him the controls, the main connected to the city's networks, following the letter of the law, and the illegally enhanced manual override alongside. A little more secure than an empty vehicle whisked from the city's streets, Clint tells him. As the car moves out of the shelter of the garage, it enters a shunt that feeds into the transport lines that cross the city.

The initial ascent into the upper level lines is slow, but they soon reach cruising velocity as they pass through the flyover that arches over the superblocks at the southwestern edge of the island of Manhattan. City-mandated green spaces break up the monotony of the tall towers on either side of the line, affording them a look into the parks and forested atriums that dot the island. There might not be ships that go between the stars, but they see plenty of flying things, like the barges that float over the river that snakes its way through the city. It winds out of their sight as they descend into Brooklyn proper to take advantage of an elevated interchange. The river eventually bleeds into the vast artificial floodplains and capillary catchments that surround the entire city to turn into a slow, underground system that serves as the foundation of various hemispheric rehydration projects. Irrigation channels and microspigots governed by precise jewel bearings sustain the farmlands folded around the city. The permasoft becomes more active the further out one goes, as it becomes more and more saturated with robotic tillers, nanodrones that forms canals made of themselves under the surface, churning regolith alongside acidifiers that ooze their way through the uppermost crust. Between them lie colonies of lichen and above them stretch endless prairies of aggressively engineered creosotes, spikerush, acacia and yucca, their entwined roots jealously keeping the soil from blowing away like so much dust. Transit lines cut through the low valley, connecting the city to nearby cities. Sometimes clouds of moths overwhelm the heat and pollutant filters of the charging stations arrayed along the lines and the internecine fighting between the transit managers and the basin managers start up again, causing headaches for everyone else. From the city center, though, they look like flurries of dark snow, a magic trick on a planet that doesn't have much weather.

The pale dome of the Terminal at the city's center, lined with top-of-the-line ceramic tiles, is really a bubble half-buried in the substrate and lodged into the bedrock. Clint show Steve a schematic for the structure, whose internal composition sort of resembles a layer cake of made of sunflower disks, pressed together and set on an angle and shaved into a sphere. There are loading bays that lead into the dome at every level, and a practically living, breathing hydraulic lift system inside, controlled by a mix of supercomputers and people, that shuttle people and goods to and from the core, the warrens of passageways, atria, and mobile storage wrapped all around it, and major destinations around town.

In spite of the city's regulatory efforts, buildings and structures have a tendency creep out from the dome's surroundings and attach themselves to the Terminal, but with varying levels of success, depending on the temperament of the zoning and planning board that happens to be in power at a given moment. Shunts, transit lines of all kinds and sizes, and buttresses, multi-use buildings in of themselves, wrap around the Terminal like a nest around an egg, albeit the mismatch in scale reminds Clint of the lifestyles of cuckoo birds. He directs the car to find itself a parking pod near the office, a small, unassuming lower-level suite in one of the blocks that jut out from the base of the giant dome and partway into the Terminal. With the car stowed away, they take another lift up to an arcade along the way that overlooks a plaza, complete with fountain, strips of grass, and load-bearing glass columns interspersed with masses of people.

"This is my favorite place in this quadrant," Clint says as they pass groups of chatty travelers and workers. Steve doesn't say anything, just gives him a look.

"Noodles," Clint assures him.

"Sounds good," Steve says, unconvinced, even though Clint has seen him practicing with chopsticks in the canteen.

"It'll be great," Clint says. They turn into an alley off of the main walkway, passing holo theaters and battery vendors and wholesalers of tea, spices and produce at first, storefronts piled with baskets of silver kitchenware, and then further in, shadowy stands where anyone can get a glass of iced aquavit as well as narrow stalls whose precariously stocked shelves stretch back and back, seemingly endless, that sell anything from knick-knacks to porn to obsolete collectors' parts and robot crickets to dull, rust-bitten souvenirs. Steve doesn't bump into a single person and barely blinks as they walk through and past the riotous billows of signs, adverts, mini holo loops and solicits along Terminal's crowded passageways.

"You know a lot about this city," Steve comments.

"Some," Clint says.

"What's your neighborhood like?"

The spot between Clint's shoulders itch. "Lots of people."

Steve glances at the pedestrians streaming by, most of them comfortably ensconced in their own networks, his face a picture of concentration instead of bewilderment or unease, so Clint knows that he's using the contacts. "Yeah. You're here often?"

"Just when I'm hungry," Clint replies. The place has some of the best noodles in the city, served up in big lacquer bowls. There are usually some empty benches despite the crowds, though spotting them and getting there before someone else is the real challenge. There is a row of them, cheap, delicious places for eats, lining a wall inside one of Terminal's most well organized knock-off gallerias. He sometimes buys his socks from a grizzled old lady who occupies one of the tiny corner stalls. She's also one of the city's sharpest bookies, but Clint doesn't know about that, officially.

They turn into a bigger alley. The way widens and the ceiling opens up to the dome. Shadows from the moving lift arms darken the alley for a moment. They stop at the corner, lit up with signs that spin in the air, advertising the day's specials. Clint ducks under the awning of the shop, scanning the restaurant for open tables. His gaze catches on the tables pushed together just to the side of the main counter, closest to them, and he didn't think it could be possible, but their flashy outfits have gotten even more... And—

"Do they look different to you, too?" he asks Steve in a whisper.

He nods, the movement nearly imperceptible. "Interesting camouflage."

The Asgardians, half of them in the middle of slurping noodles from their bowls, spot them. Their faces have changed, but there is still only the one woman, and although they look _different_, somehow remain themselves. Clint's lenses protest the scrutiny, and he brings all of his displays down except for his emergency readouts. Nothing amiss. Clint risks raising his ambient dampers to the max and sends a general call out for available agents in the area to respond. The recording protocol blinks forlornly just at the edge of his field of vision. If all that it's getting is noise, same as before, he doesn't have to worry about the other patrons, though their sideways looks make him twitchy. The one called Thor throws out an arm. "The Cap! And..."

"It's just 'Cap,' " Clint tells Thor, who graciously nods his head in his direction. "I have been remiss."

"Hawkeye," Clint tells him as he makes his way closer to the tables, cautiously, giving his primary alias but banking on it being the sort of thing Asgardians dig. He's right; Thor's smile brightens.

"A far-seeing mortal, apt," Loki says before Thor can get a word in. "Here to sup?"

"Showing my friend here the sights," Clint replies. "Anyplace you liked?"

Loki only puts on a polite smile, but Thor taps the edge of his bowl with his chopsticks. "Too many to count. It is truly a charming place, Midgard. And the food is much refreshing."

"It's wonderful," Volstagg says emphatically as he reaches for a plate of fried greens. Fandral adds, "I'm glad we, saved Midgard, for last, else we would, have been, sorely, disappointed," while battling Hogun for the last piece of cold cut on the plate between them. "Just as well that we leave our tour incomplete," Sif says, gazing down at her empty bowl with a wistful air. Clint doesn't get why she looks so down, given that the area of the table between her and Volstagg have been stacked with more than a dozen bowls. "I understand now why the frost giants coveted it so."

Loki throws a flippant hand in the air. "I dare not think this darling world deserves the attention of even those discerning brutes." His face does something ugly on the last word. The hint about a conflict is what interests Clint, but he makes a note of that, too.

"Your enemy?" he asks Thor.

"I have no enemies," he responds good-naturedly. Clint isn't sure if he's joking or not. Thor sounds like he believes it, which is different from looking like one means it, and Clint's estimation of him, a needle on a dial, wavers back and forth. Supreme confidence and stupidity lie on one end, but he hasn't figured out the other side yet.

"How can anyone trust a king without enemies?" Loki says. "This is why everyone tells you that your statecraft needs work." At Thor's look, he amends it to say, "Why I tell you."

"Thor has no need for enemies afield," Hogun says. Loki sparkles in his direction. "You may be right."

"You're a king?" Steve asks.

"Soon," Thor answers, looking pleased.

"King of what?" Clint asks.

"Asgard and the Nine Realms," Thor says, as though somehow what this is and what it means should be evident. "It merely means the All-Father's protection and the goodwill of the denizens of Asgard. It will be for the benefit of all," he elaborates when neither of them responds.

Steve's stance changes. "Maybe we don't need your help."

The Asgardians shift in their seats. "Show the crown prince respect, or speak not at all," Loki says.

"Whoever you are or wherever you're from, don't matter to me," Steve says. "But if you're going to go around declaring yourself in charge, you and I are going to have a problem."

Even though he's standing next to him right then and there, Clint can't quite believe that Steve is apparently declaring his willingness to fight the Asgardians, but as luck would have it—a twisted value of luck, Clint informs the universe—warnings flash across his lenses just then, at the same time that a communiqué from Maria Hill comes in, answering his call and using the opportunity to request backup from him, sketching out a situation that probably qualifies for at least a level five alert. Her location on the map on his lenses is a round, bright blue dot, eleven tiers down in the direction of the core. More warnings pop up on the map, displaying the hotspots around the littoral, unauthorized machine signals. From a waiting lounge on an upper-level deck, Natasha also sends an acknowledgment back, adding that she's going to be delayed by an unavoidable traffic snarl on one of the lifts that vine downward.

Thor looks Steve up and down and smiles. Sif puts a hand on his arm.

"Your pledge," she says.

"Surely a friendly bout offends no one."

"Much less dullards peated in backwater," Loki adds, propping his head up with a hand, elbow squarely in the way of Volstagg's getting at a saucer of roasted peanuts.

"Now that goes too far, brother," Thor says.

Loki gazes at the two of them standing there, awkwardly taking up the restaurant's entry. "Some halidom raised to high altars, then."

Clint nudges Steve in the arm. "I saw it," Steve says, terse.

"Yeah. Anyway. This has been great," Clint tells the Asgardians. "But I'm afraid we'll have to catch up some other time. Late to a meeting."

"You haven't had anything to eat," Volstagg points out.

"It's a let's-lunch meeting. We're just scoping things out ahead of time," Clint says, waving his hand in the universal sign for vaguely.

"How very clever," Loki says, looking straight at him, index and middle fingers resting against a temple, as in, he somehow knows, has more than an inkling of, the data coming through—or it could just be a feeling, a hiccup in Clint's neurochemical pathways—but he doesn't want to stick around to chase it down and lay it open and verify. He starts backtracking his way out. To his relief, Steve follows his lead and the Asgardians stay in their seats.

"You must come carousing with us someday," Thor calls out after them.

"Don't count on it!" Steve says over his shoulder, irritation plain. Bright laughter follows them out, but Clint has too many other things to concern himself with, namely one Agent Hill instructing Natasha to trip the general evacuation order for this part of the dome. Natasha is blisteringly fast; the order starts to steamroll its way not just across his field of vision but everyone in the signal's range. The endpiece of the notice warns that the aural warnings will start up soon, shrieks designed to drill into your ears and drive people in the direction of diminishing sound and relative safety. Probably there are plenty of people in the dome who have had their implants tweaked to make the announcements less annoying or to tune them out altogether, betting on most so-called emergency situations being drills and various municipal forces training, but the programs that stick uncooperative individuals with penalty taxes and fines using protocols that are notoriously difficult to thwart.

Clint follows the crowd, Steve right behind, but they break away from the main evacuation path to head toward the vehicle storage pods. He sends Natasha a request for a hack into the local lift system—Terminal's safeguards are best left to the experts—and the arms break out of their locks and start moving, revolving and lining up pods around the unloading platform. The lift isn't going to stop for them, Natasha says, she's timing it so that they get to Agent Hill's position as quickly as possible, which means making inside the window for transferring to the next lift system. A message that has something to do with barricades and having finished evacuating the last transports stream in from Hill, its main section corrupted by interference. Natasha overrides the locks and they push the safety gates apart. The two of them plant their feet, pushing against the gates to keep them from automatically springing back closed, and wait for her signal. Storage units and vehicle pods slide past them together, when normally the stream would be of one or the other: Natasha's recombinatrices at work. When the pod with their car inside arrives and opens, Clint and Steve jump, slamming against the car as the pod door slides back shut behind them and everything plunges into pitch dark.

Clint keys the car's door open and once inside, he pulls at the panel under his seat and slides the case out. A tug on one of the lower tabs loosens a carry strap and Clint slings the whole thing over one shoulder, crouched on the floor, tightening the strap across his chest. The shielding built into the car disrupts the interference, a little. It's not the unsettling, unidentifiable noise that obscures the Asgardians, but a kind better understood, one they've been in before. Once might be coincidence and if Clint were the superstitious type, he would be content to call twice luck. Their pod slides into a lift chute and they feel themselves descending towards the center. Given that Terminal's emergency protocols have gone into full effect and that most of the lifts would be going in the opposite direction, carrying massive numbers of people, the fact that Natasha's hack is shuttling them towards the disturbance is no less than miraculous. Clint patches Hill's incoming into the car's display.

"Doesn't look like she's—"

Her status on his lenses blips out of existence as the interference suddenly ratchets up, making both of them wince. The car's control lights dim but flare back to normal levels. Clint's connection to Natasha evaporates, the last update from her showing how far away she still is from the core, where she would be able to access Terminal's higher-level functions.

"Hydra usually doesn't do hostage situations," Clint says, thinking through the firm's unparalleled trove of case files and reports and risk reduction agendas concerning the group. He and Steve and the car spin and accelerate as the pod is sucked through another chute, dredging one of Clint's old memories. The interference dies down and then picks up, then goes down again. It feels like a tide that's oscillating to a superfast moon. Hill's signals are still coming in, but without new data. He wonders how bad it is, the best way to defuse it, where it might lie on the scale between possible and fatal. "They go for the big statements, sets."

"I'm aware."

Steve's expression makes him nervous. Natasha would be better at explaining this, Clint thinks. "We have to de-escalate things, whatever it is they're doing, but that doesn't necessarily mean rescue. It's got to be neutralization of the threat, first."

"I understand," Steve says. "But they— Don't you—" He breaks off.

He's reminded of tissues, muscles, fragile things that rip. "It's not personal," Clint says, comprehending.

Steve's mouth twists. "I realized. So what do you fight for?" he asks.

Clint weighs it, trick question. He knows a lot about these. Gluing all kinds of disparate parts together to make a functional whole, distributing the balance, finding the fulcrum. The step after that, he doesn't always get right.

"You really can't ask me things like that when we haven't even gotten to first base," he tells Steve, feeling calm.

A laugh escapes him, involuntary and genuine. "Beg your pardon."

Clint shrugs, the gesture easy, gratified that the joking worked and concerned that the intermittent updates he's getting from Terminal's public databanks, judging from the timestamps, are becoming wildly out of sync with each other. Four dull blares vibrate their way through the pod, the signal that they're reaching a lift junction. The rest of the way towards the core has to be through non-cargo, public-access passages, and as Hill indicated, there are going to be barricades set up everywhere. They might have to blast their way through, which doesn't allay Clint's concerns, even though the energy cells ringed around the core would have been powered down at the first sign of trouble and the Terminal's operators and technicians would have already evacuated to the dome's outer layers, leaving only skeleton crews and drones behind. Terminal's core-level security doesn't have any meaningful human components; the designers weren't willing to leave it up to the vagaries of non-machine parts. No matter what the situation is like, Clint hopes that it won't come down to dealing with the core itself, because he really doesn't want to participate in messing around with interstellar slides and he's pretty sure that Natasha wouldn't, either.

As though on cue the interference dies with a whoosh, like someone falling onto a crash cushion and punching the air out. Natasha's voice crackles through the public emergency announcement system, absolutely balmy.

"Citizens, please remain in your designated evacuation zones until further notice. Joyriders: expect some turbulence."

Clint hooks an arm around a seatbelt loop and grabs an overhead handle. "Brace—"

They go upside-down and then plunge, skidding across something on the way, and then the pod tumbles down a slope and shoots across something that crunches in their wake, to what sounds like sacks of processing wafers to Clint's lurching stomach. He tells it that since it doesn't have any actual aural inputs, its opinion is quite invalid. The highlighted section in the incident report where Clint is supposed to put in inflicted-damage estimates flashes. Clint shoves it into temporary standby, losing his grip on the overhead handle in the process and landing squarely on Steve's midsection. The pod crashes open and Clint shouts an emergency command as the vehicle skids out, and the car's internal gyros kick in and they tip back over to level, wheels screaming. The external cameras show a broken jumble of pictures of a causeway littered with bits of metal and a lift head starting to break away from the end of the narrow road, lined with office modules. The core is visible just below them, a perfectly round egg in its nest, the Terminal in miniature, surrounded by ridged slide and security apparatuses, flat, revolving bulwarks, stationary platforms used by maintenance drones, and the glitter of the architraves.

"Are we there yet?" Steve asks, shifting.

"Hang on," Clint says, and in the next instant the car careens to the right. He reaches up to input a maneuver into the car's controls and it starts to accelerate. Natasha disables the traffic safeties for their benefit; she has to be somewhere close, but Clint hasn't spotted her yet. "We're going to, ah, jump."

Steve pushes out from under him to sit up, face nearly inside the floating display that shows how little road they have left. "That's too far, unless you're about to tell me this thing can fly."

"Nah, it's a mobile orthoaxial tetrad operations responder."

"A what?" Steve asks as the roof of the car blossoms into four pieces and the floor splits into three long sections. As the wind whips across them, Clint grabs Steve's arm before he falls off when the two flanks of the car pull themselves beneath the main body. The gyros' spin ratchets up to a high whine as the wheels slide into each other and up into a cavity that opens up in the center. The causeway ends, the mobile responder's four legs stretch out, their shock absorbers lock into the chassis, and they go leaping onto the lift arm in the process of swinging away, landing with a crash and making the arm shudder. The thin girders under the skin of the arm screech, signaling an imminent rupture, and Clint switches the controls over to Natasha's capable albeit death-defying sense of direction. The responder clunks along the distressed arm and leaps down to another. The lift they were just on snaps back from the force of their departure and hits an adjacent arm, making it fling an empty passenger pod into an inert cleaning drone. It tumbles down the curve of the core, taking out a series of antennae on its way, and a cry goes up. Clint sees the tiny figures of Hydra agents climbing their way up the surface of the hollow spherical bowl, set into the ground, which cradles the core.

Natasha sends a signal for the responder to jump again. Clint and Steve cling to the seats, which have divided into handholds and shield plates. A shallow basket attached to four metal legs. It's not the most reassuring way to travel.

"Incoming!" Steve shouts as something booms, just barely missing them on their next jump down. Clint raps his knuckles on the case and it opens with a hiss, forming shapes that he could fit together in his sleep or blind, lightning-fast. The rest of the case rolls out into a flexible quiver, each arrow stuck to the fabric by a magnetic grip. Clint peeks over the top of the shield plate in front of him as he fits an arrow to his bow. He pauses as Natasha gives him a signal to hold, and in the next moment a plume of foam buries the platform where the Hydra agent who had fired the pulse cannon was standing, hardens into a shell that only Terminal's ever-changing polymer decoders will loosen. Natasha has to be very close, but that first shot getting through unchallenged means that Hydra must have managed to disable the core's security. Another pulse, this one from a different direction, rocks them, forcing them to drop down to another lift arm, and Clint fires the arrow on their way down. It clips the hostile on the load-bearing arm, and he turns and flails and lets a pulse loose up into the platform above him, blasting another couple of hostiles into smithereens before falling backwards into the empty space above which the core is suspended, the deep trench where the energy comes spiraling up when the sphere is active.

"Agent Hill?" Clint asks, searching his displays.

An affirmative status blinks on his screens—injuries non-debilitating, able to fight, not under duress, the firm's three essentials for agents in the field—and Clint takes the responder across the arms below, the engine protesting the jumps, crashing it onto a platform that barely holds. One of the responder's legs gives out and tips both of them ungraciously onto the surface. It serves as an impromptu shield; the pulses don't let up, and although Clint hears the hiss of foam once, twice, there are two many of them for Natasha to handle alone and their vehicle isn't going to last forever.

"Nice landing," Hill says, sticking her head out from where she was hiding behind a drone. She lifts an eyebrow at Steve, who nods at her awkwardly.

"What are you doing here?" Clint asks.

"Just came back from my vacation," she answers. "Got anything?"

Clint hefts his bow. She gives him a familiar look.

"I keep telling you. You should take up archery," Clint says. "It makes you cool."

"Maybe later, in my copious free time," Hill says. "And no."

Nonchalantly, Clint makes a show of fitting some specialty heads to a couple of arrows, and then folds the flat quiver into a carrying shape. Steve frowns at the two of them. The pulses have died down. It's eerily quiet, especially with the interference climbing again.

"You don't need all that paraphernalia with your telepathic predispositions," Hill says resignedly. She scoots out from behind the drone with a large, flat, square rolling leather bag. She flips it open and behind him Steve sucks in a breath. "What amounted to a vacation, anyway. Suffice to say, we're good with Central again."

"This is more fun," Clint tells her. He regards the circle of brightly colored metal with curiosity. It reminds him of a classical target, but a spray of solid-state bullets, stacatto punches through the responder's armor, cuts his reminiscing short. Through the data flickering on and off through his lenses, he sees the hostiles closing in on their position as well as Natasha circling around towards them via a service gangway overhead.

"Telepathic?" Steve asks, crouching down.

"It's supposed to be a secret," Clint says. He hears a couple of shouts, much too close, from the other side of the responder. "But yeah, like mind reading," he adds, and realizes that it is completely the wrong thing to say, that it's too late to take it back.

"Mind reading?" Steve says, voice rising. Hill's eyes widen slightly and she shifts her weight to her back heel. "Mind reading?!"

"Cap, listen," Clint begins.

"Hand me my shield," Steve says very calmly. Hill is about to refuse but Clint gives her a look, accepts that he probably deserves that not-quite-roll of her eyes, and turning, tosses the round piece of metal to Steve, takes one last look at the bastards standing over them with charged weapons about to kiss life sweet goodbye.

"It isn't!" Clint shouts at him before he shoulders his bow and hurtles over the side of the mangled platform onto the one below. Hill lands on the opposite side, ducking a little on instinct as the platform above them violently shakes. The Hydra agents are hastily reloading, their guns spitting partials to the ground. A series of loud thwacks and pained grunts and the sound of shattering bodyarmor follow. Hill checks something on her lenses.

"Handle this end," she says, before swinging over the railing and dropping another platform down, running and dodging her way toward a moving platform attached to a spinneret, and that's when he sees it, an incendiary device, a container whose feet are gripping the lower curve of the core, the material clear and faintly glowing. It holds something that looks like a bunch of interlocking rings with alternating spin, condensing enough decay products to sustain a field that destabilizes at a predictable rate, a timer, maybe, but none of that matters because below that is what the Hydra soldiers must have been working on, what made their interference so inconsistent: propellant massed around the lower aperture of the core like cotton candy.

Clint looks back at Hill, and sees Natasha land feet first into a hostile taking aim at the back of her head and roll behind a parked drone as bullets dog her shadow. Hill makes it safely to cover, and from behind the drone, Natasha's hand comes up, one finger pointed to the sky. Clint cuts all his incomings and outgoing signals so that everything he has goes dark, and a moment later Natasha's hack boosts Hydra's jammers past the breaking point, making all of the hostiles around them yell and stagger from the overwhelming feedback. It's got to hurt, but doesn't even slow Steve down; Clint hears him land another bone-crushing hit, hears his opponent go down, then another. They don't get back up.

"They've been stockpiling A-T for half the time he's been under!" Hill yells. She motions for Clint to wait for her signal and disappears down a service tunnel entrance at the end of the far platform, out of sight. Clint hears the remaining Hydra agents split up and half of them thunder down after her, but Natasha is in their way and has it under control. Clint notes the location of the trigger device and climbs back up to see how Steve is doing. He's banged up and his shield is bloody, but he's still standing, Hydra weapons and bodies scattered around him. Natasha takes down another one and the hostile's scream as he falls over the edge of the platform distracts them briefly, but Steve's attention swings back, and Clint tries to stave off the feeling of being trapped. He holds his hands up, doesn't glance around; he thinks that was all of them, going by Hill's earlier transmissions.

"I'm not. It's just something stupid."

Steve glares at him. "Can you read my mind?" he asks bluntly.

"Are you thinking about how hot Nat looks in her suit?" Clint asks.

"No," Steve replies, even though now he is.

"Then no. Your secrets are safe. Anyway I'm not a 'path."

"I don't have secrets," Steve mutters, mulish. He sits down on his heels, letting the edge of his shield rest against the mesh of the platform, and rubs his face. "Gotta go easy on a twentieth century guy, Agent Barton. I was only just getting used to having aliens around."

"You're so full of shit," Clint says.

Steve looks up with a consternated, lopsided grin. "Clint Barton, you are somewhat like a guy I used to know."

"Yeah?"

"He was a card, too," Steve elaborates, climbing to his feet. Clint waits, but that's all there is; he clamps his mouth shut and when Natasha hauls herself up onto their platform, offers her a hand up. Her gaze brushes over Steve; he's already bruising, blood vessels stark against skin, raw with scraped cuts, some of it red-edged char. He's dented his right knee in, but is somehow still standing with placid face and eyes fixed on something distant, and then something approaching their location like a rocket.

"Hey—"

Clint nocks an arrow to his bow but the two-person Hydra flier unleashes a crash wave into them, ripping the platform apart and spilling dead bodies into the core trench. The three of them fall—Clint and Natasha manage to grab on to a piece of the platform still attached to its moorings. The responder tumbles downward and gets wedged near the bottom of the space between the core and the bowl in which it lies suspended. Steve has managed to grab a length of fiber-optic cable higher up. He swings and takes a calculated leap onto the flier as it whooshes past, knocking one of them off the craft. It disappears out of their sight around the core and Clint hears Steve's regular exhalations over the comm link, his angry voice demanding answers.

"—only thing they fished out of the water? The greatest treasure under heaven and earth and you think—" the voice of the Hydra soldier sneers over the pickup. Steve roars something back, and there's a loud squeal of metal on ceramic as the flier hits an obstacle, but Clint tunes it all out at the realization, as another piece slides into place. The organization-wide systems crash makes more sense if a revived super-soldier isn't the only piece in play, if there was something else, probably more valuable for the higher-ups, somehow connected up with him. Maybe it wasn't Captain America that the seafloor trawlers were looking for, what they found. The flier flies back around into view, battered and smoking, when a streak of red and gold knocks it into another platform, making it spin wildly and explode into a spectacular ball of flame. Steve lands on the damaged responder with an ugly thump, but he's still moving, amazingly. Clint starts shimmying down the remains of the platform and slides the rest of the way down, stopping when his feet hit one of the responder's legs, an impact that rattles his teeth. Natasha looks as though she'll follow, but instead starts climbing up, disappearing in a show of long legs over the top.

"We have this covered," Clint hears her say. He starts to help Steve pry himself loose from the wreckage of the responder.

"Doesn't look like it," Iron Man retorts. He hovers over the space between the core and the surrounding wall, the outer edges of his armor scored by the friction, the carapace over that whistling as it whirls, a metallurgical wonder that the firm's techs and various scientists on the firm's payroll suspect is somehow hyperdimensional, because otherwise it would be an impossibility, there's definitely some kind of quantum weirdness woven into the suit's metal. Or Stark made a deal with the devil and wished for absolute power over the forces of gravity; according to the brains in the trust, either explanation is just as plausible as the other. "You guys probably want to get out of there," Iron Man says. "This thing is starting up again."

The core starts to hum and Clint feels the hair on his arms stand up. "If it's going to blow, we have to vamoose it out of here," Steve croaks.

"Vamoose?" Iron Man says. "Where did you dig him up?"

"We didn't dig," Natasha tells him. "Do you mind?"

"Since you asked so nicely," Iron Man says as he swoops down, then curses as he's repelled by a burst of energy, the core re-activating. "What the," he says, sounding annoyed. The hum gets louder. Hill patches in directly to Clint. Her voice fuzzes.

"-ommerc- traff- -verride -ommission declar- -on-emerg-y get ou-"

"Uh, the supremacy of the commerce clause or not, they shouldn't restart it when—" Iron Man says, then launches himself out of the way of an arc of crackling energy.

"-dra duped t- surveillance senso- on lo-"

"Come on," Steve says, hauling Clint up.

"We can't let it speed up!" Iron Man yells, trying to push his way closer and being repelled. Natasha taps her earpiece and speaks urgently. "Agent Hill, maybe if we activate all the immobilization systems at once—"

Steve's head whips around and he sees the Hydra timer spinning past. The core is picking up speed and soon the wind is going to make it impossible for them to breathe, much less move. They're moments away from being falling to their deaths down the trench underneath the core. The responder starts to creak and shift. One of the legs are still intact, even the hydraulic fluid casings; Clint shoves and yanks it into shape, locks the built-in pieces into position, and draws a bolt out.

"That's a giant crossbow," Steve says.

"Thanks."

Steve just shakes his head at him, eyes obscured by hair blowing every which way. Wrinkles form at the corners of his mouth, trying to keep it from curving up. The wind rises. "Get that guncotton lit," he yells at him over the growing vortices of sound, never mind that it's _aeternalite_, enough to blow a crater in the city straight down into the bedrock if the core gets up to operating speed, in a blast many, many orders of magnitude beyond what even the solar system's biggest city outputs in a full cycle. He's not sure what Steve thinks he's going to do but that's okay, he pulls and he knows how the bolt will fly, along a trajectory dowsed from among incalculable others, the way spooled into a single thread and stretched taut, something that snaps not when the bowstring is loosed but when his eyes find the target. The programming in his lenses tries to help, red lights lining up and then splitting apart again, the crosshairs coming up deuce.

"Got it," Clint says, ignoring the signals ghosting across his vision, and lets go.

The bolt smashes through the center of the device, knocking it clear off of the core, and the propellant dissipates just as the wind reaches the speed where it can lift hunks of metal; the responder rears up and sweeps them off their feet, pushing them inward where they'll surely become mortar-and-pestled into atoms, but Clint feels himself being pulled up by a hand, the force of it nearly just taking his arm off, and even as he bites down on a scream gets dropped unceremoniously onto the observation deck that overlooks the core by Iron Man, who takes a hard spill across the deck to the far end. His armor is making alarming, undoubtedly short-circuiting sounds. A hatch near the two of them opens and Hill climbs out, sporting new scratches down one arm and all over her fingers.

"What about the tele— mind reading?" Steve asks, sitting up. His shield rests at his feet, not a single scratch on it.

"Just yield standard non-compliant," Clint replies, out of breath. He fights to get it under control. "One of those places. Waves didn't register properly, happens all the time, they say."

"Persnickety perspicacity, people say," Natasha says as she makes her way over.

"How long you been waiting to use that one?" Clint asks.

Natasha's smirk is fond. "A while."

Steve is quiet.

"It's just meant a different life," Clint says. "Instead of being a slide jockey, I'm SHIELD's most eligible bachelor."

Natasha scoffs. "You wish," she says. "Coulson," she tells Steve.

Hill shakes her head as she scrubs dried blood from her fingers with the edge of her shirt. "New development. There's a musician." She narrows her eyes at Clint. He grins evilly, but his victory face is premature; Hill nods, businesslike. "Protocol dictates that in the event Agent Coulson vacates his position, it falls upon me to take up his duties until a replacement can be found."

Steve smiles a little, Natasha smiles a lot more, and Clint starts to protest. Hill's gaze turns very serious. "Want to duel to the death for it?"

"Uh," Clint says. "You're kidding about the death part, right?"

"Oh yeah, sure," she says, _serious_.

Clint knows when it's the right time to admit defeat. It's one of his most dependable traits. "Impropriety," he mutters.

"I like athletes," Hill says. "Counting on you, Cupid."

Clint sighs. Natasha laughs. Hill checks for an update.

"We better go," she tells them. "Operators are on their way back. Can you manage?" she asks Natasha, who is carefully not looking in Clint's direction. Her mission is still a go.

"Copy," she says. "Am going to miss my connection because of you," she says to him, lightly kicking the sole of one of his feet as she walks past.

"Better run," Clint says to her back, watching her disappear upside-down, even though craning his head that way is really killing his back. He slumps down prone when she's gone. Hill crooks a finger at him. "Haven't got all day, Agent Barton."

Clint slowly gets his feet under him. "Copy, Agent Hill."

"Isn't anyone going to thank me?" Iron Man asks, creaking his way towards them. Steve looks at him quizzically. Hill doesn't look impressed.

"What were you doing in Terminal, anyway?"

"Stockholder meeting in one of the conference hotels here."

"I thought you were a busy man, Mr. Stark."

"Funnily enough. We're currently in the middle of a coffee break," Iron Man says. "You're welcome."

"What happened to you, Mr. Stark?" Steve blurts out.

"I made a friend, Agent."

"Yeah, we all know about the suit," Clint says.

Iron Man laughs, the sound quiet. "A couple of friends, I mean."

"Let's go," Hill tells the two of them. "Captain."

Steve snaps out of it and nods, expression hooded, doesn't look behind him. Clint thinks it's for the best. The suit powers up and hurtles upward, and they make their way up through Terminal's insides towards where Agent Hill's car is parked. The attendant on duty, a surly, bored teenager with an attitude, refuses to call the premium pod up while she's on her lunch break. Hill marches her off to see her manager while Clint and Steve wait in the parking lobby, saying very little. Once in a while, Steve rests a hand on the shield, wrapped up in a combination of all of their jackets. Just after Hill departs, they see the Asgardian group again, apparently conducting a heated argument about where they parked. There are five of them, this time, no Loki, looking different and simultaneously themselves yet again.

"They must be following us," Steve says.

"Conventional wisdom states that thrice is no coincidence, but conspiracy," Clint remarks.

"Really?"

"I don't even know," Clint says, dead tired. Each of his active screens is demanding his undivided attention, like barkers, and he really can't bring himself to update his report with the information at the moment.

"I think it was meant," Steve says. His eyes does that distant thing again, their blue uncanny, then it's gone just as quickly. Clint doesn't really understand, doesn't ask. It seems like something private. Unknowable, maybe.

The Asgardians see them and wave. Upon reaching them, Thor inquires if they were also part of the "drill of emergency," whether it happens to be a common pastime, and what other interesting activities people engage in around "Midgard." Steve is too earnest and polite for his own good and gets drawn into the conversation easily with not only Thor but also the others in spite of his suspicion and hostility earlier. Clint finds himself edging away from them fairly quickly because he doesn't think the ability to not die laughing happens to be one that he has mastered as a highly trained covert operative. Steve lets slip something about "bad guys" and Sif tosses her head. "Let them try Asgard's fair shores."

"Bad news. We shut them down," Clint says.

"Surely that is good news," Sif says, unblinking. Clint is suddenly reminded of Hill. "You're right," he hastily adds. The noise is giving him a headache and he hopes that Hill is on her way back; she would be a boss at breaking this party up. Unfortunately, she's maintaining radio silence—Clint wonders if the manager is an intransigent teenager as well—and Thor seems to be having a great time. He claps Steve on the shoulder. "I have no designs on this fair realm. The coronation— merely a formality. A celebration! You must all come."

"Now that goes too far, brother," a cool voice says. Loki winks into existence in their midst. "I was right. We're on the level below next to the pointy green thing."

Volstagg and Hogun groan and Fandral exclaims with delight. Gold—plastic chips—exchange hands.

"If feuing boughs out our father sees fit, then but fools should doubt his wisdom," Loki says. "But Asgard is no place for mortals."

"Father," Thor says, becoming pensive. "Well," he says, turning to Clint and Steve, "when I am king, I shall hold tourneys. Everyone agrees that those are respectable."

The Asgardians nod and bring up examples. Clint is beginning to think that he's not the only one from a circus in this group. The conversation moves on to feats of strength and Steve starts bullshitting with the rest of them—Clint had forgotten that he used to be military, even if he doesn't fit into any odd category anymore—while a bored Loki wanders away, alights on him.

"Exciting day for you, huh," Clint says.

"Oh, the diversions," Loki says, examining his fingernails. "Badly done."

Clint feels as though he has the right pieces but not the picture. Diversions, he said. "What is the line of succession like on your world?"

Loki looks into his eyes and tips his head to one side. "What is it like, indeed?" He dwells on a thought. "Have I crossed your sights?"

Gold, azure, crimson. "Yes," Clint answers.

Loki regards him from above, clearly thinking him a fool for saying so. He leans down a little sideways, still looking forward, closing the space like they're friends. "Archer," he says, softly, "with a word you have made yourself a very dangerous man."

Clint grins humorlessly. "That was your warning shot."

"Noble of you," Loki remarks as he straightens, seemingly bored again.

"You only get one."

"Kind of you," Loki murmurs. He's a liar to the bone and Clint feels just about ready to fly. He gets up to leave. A moment later Loki rises to his feet and arranges the folds of his robe so that they fall perfectly in place. "What do you do on a second date?"

"Promise not to kiss and tell, your Highness."

Loki smiles. "Take care, good Hawk."

Clint lets him have the last word; Loki more or less declares the outing over, and Clint's right, he's the one who controls his and the other Asgardians' appearances. They disappear again, and this time he's sure even Steve can't see where they've gone. They wait a while longer for Hill but the car finally rolls up, and the ride back to headquarters is uneventful. Hill is writing up a report while managing the clean-up crews and only asks short questions to fill the gaps in her timeline. Clint almost falls asleep, but Steve looking things up on the car's info screen, mostly articles from the municipal databanks on Stark Industries, keeps him up. At headquarters they're ushered to a conference room for the debriefing, where Hill leaves them to their own devices—she's already turned her report in. Being second-in-command has its perks, or privileges, rather; she has ten meetings and schedules to every one of Clint's.

"I thought he would be made out of cabbages, or something," Steve says while they're waiting.

Clint is surprised into a laugh. "Why cabbages?"

Steve says something about the ridiculousness of the future under his breath, but the chime for the debriefing to begin rings out and cuts their conversation short. The laugh stays bubbling in Clint's chest, warming him up. In all his time alive and free he has never met anyone so strange. He tucks the feeling away to focus on the meeting. Coulson enters the debriefing room first.

"Thanks, Clint," he says before anything else gets said.

"I want you to know that you're not getting off that easy," he tells him.

"That was easy?" Steve says.

"If we could get back on track," the Director says as he enters.

"Yes," Steve says. "I would definitely like to know what kind of track you've been planning for me."

"Maybe we've been giving you time to suss out whether or not you want to be on our side," Fury offers. It's a lie, but Clint can see the truth in it, too. The firm's repairs seem to be complete and new projects underway. It's not his call, but he's watching.

Steve frowns. "What does your organization's acronym stand for again?"

"Sol Hamacratic Intelsat Ecosphere Love Distributor, Captain Rogers," Clint answers. Coulson's face at that moment is truly lovely to behold; the Director on the other hand looks like he is trying _really hard_, but Clint is either getting fired (out of a cannon) or promoted, he's sure to find out soon. Steve remains as serious as ever; he's starting to like this guy. The remainder of the briefing is less fun, but Clint keeps his comments short and to the point out of respect for Hill, and when it's over, he allows himself a quiet breath. He's been given his next assignment, there's a lot of prep he's going to have to do, and as always reports to catch up on, data to sift through. He starts heading out.

"We never got the noodles," Steve suddenly says as he is pushing his chair in.

"Forget noodles," Clint says from the door. "I'll take you out for soup dumplings when I get back."

"What are soup dumplings?" Steve asks, wary.

"The best," Clint answers.

Steve nods. Pauses. "I think I have your measure."

Shifting from one foot to another, he braces himself for the worst. "What's that?"

"Wool and a yard wide, Clint," Steve simply says as he passes him by. Clint looks it up after all the channels clear and it gets him a smile, but Coulson takes over for him, or takes the assignment back, and that's going to be the last time he'll see him for a while, the adventuring something nice to recall when he's getting ready for his new assignment Earthside, the joint SHIELD and Central research division, Pegasus. It's nothing more than an amped-up security detail on the research campus, but Clint always goes where he's sent, even if he doesn't always do what he's told. From a planet where all the winds have names to a tarnished blue rock, just another mission. The investigation into what Hydra was doing at Terminal doesn't turn up much before he leaves; for a statement, blowing up the city is frustratingly opaque. Before he sets out Clint suggests a connection with the Asgardians, and Review promises that they'll follow up on it.

Maybe it'll be all right. Maybe it won't. It's a dangerous world they're waking in. That's truth, gumming up all sorts of carefully planned grand entrances and genius getaways. It's not clean and it's not precise, there are always pieces to pick up, put back together, that's how it brings him back, why he knows he'll come back. Maybe he'll still be there, maybe she'll still be there, and maybe they won't. But he doesn't take it when he goes, heart. It'll wait for him to come back to it, he doesn't think, but believes. He lives and breathes a world of lies as good as truths and truths as bad as lies so paradoxes don't worry him. He's not sure and it's not a vow, it's just his truth, dearly won, easily lost, fragile, as precious as is.

•••••

•••••

•••••

_Note: For the purposes of this fic, MCU Mars has about the same mass/gravity as Earth._

sp thanks to yeade for fielding my gravity question and p for the feedback.

•••••


	6. 6 tony finds a dragon egg (that is all)

series a

•••••

•••••

•••••

tony finds a dragon egg (that is all)

•••••

It's dusk when he finishes detonating the last of the batch. Tony rushes it just a little since this is the only trip out into the desert he can make before the end of the month when he has to show up for Fury's team-building exercise, for which Tony has coerced Pepper into baking cupcakes that he can share with rest of the class, by which Tony had actually meant cocktail mixers in quantities very much illegal to fly with. On his flight back to the tower Pepper calls to let him know that she's had a box delivered—catered, she is quick to say, and _not_ from the Hollywood bakery he initially suggested that decorates their cakes with gold foil and ruby sparklers, which Tony agrees yes, that would be rather obscene, even by his standards.

Tony sends Pepper his love and gives her a heads-up about a teeny-tiny lawsuit about noise ordinance violations that might possibly be coming their way. He hovers just before he sets foot on the landing pad on the roof of the tower, taking more care than usual, and deposits the weird rock he found to one side before stepping out of his suit. The rock is the size of a grenade, or a lemon, worn smooth, and smells like the sea when he runs it under a faucet.

It looks a little bit like malachite, which is kind of ridiculous for this part of the world, and the diagnostic he has JARVIS run comes up riddled with blanks, which probably means that Tony needs to remember to hook JARVIS up with the database at the Smithsonian again, one of these days. The rock looks very cool on his lab counter, and Tony decides that he's going to have it made into an even awesomer-looking paperweight. He could probably give it to Pepper—she can put it next to that solar-powered mini jukebox he gave her as a Happy 3rd Filing Quarter gift. Tony puts the rock out of his mind and starts fiddling with an improvement to the suit's underwater manueverability, and dozes off somewhere between laying out a new electrical circuit map and checking SHIELD's Atlantic Ocean scanner for the some geopolitical gossip.

"Aauow-hat," Tony says, and wakes up to a—hamster-sized lizard—with wings—chewing on his ear. "Ow!" Tony yelps, pulling it away and setting it down on the table. It chirps at him, opening and closing its mouth like a baby bird. Tony stares at it for a while.

"Jarvis."

"It appears to be a newborn dragon, sir."

"Where did it come from?"

"It hatched approximately two minutes ago," JARVIS answers. "Out of the rock you requested that I analyze earlier this evening."

"The rock."

"It took me by surprise as well, sir."

Tony looks up from the dragon over to the rock, now lying in broken fragments all over. The dragon lets out a thin cry.

"It seems to be hungry," JARVIS says.

"Do we have any dragon food in the house?"

"I believe there is some leftover pizza in the refrigerator from last Tuesday."

"What's today?"

"Tuesday."

Tony rubs his face and gets JARVIS to order ten cases of premium steak, pronto, and also sets him to work out where Bruce might be. Tony ends up feeding the hungry dragon some of the pizza, after taking a bite out of the slice to show that it's still okay, and quietly watches the dragon as it gobbles everything down, including the paper plate.

"You should have a name," Tony says. "Do you have a name?" He pauses. He's feeling a bit breathless. "If you don't, is it okay if I name you?"

He waits, and is disappointed when the dragon doesn't say anything. It just lolls in place and slowly blinks. Aren't dragons supposed to talk? If dragons don't talk Tony is thinking he's going to put some novelists on the list. His eyes widen.

"Oh shit, you're _telepathic_," he says. _I'm thinking of a number between ten and fifty! Four! Omelette! I'm hungry._

The dragon stretches its neck. It gazes deeply into Tony's eyes, its pupils blooming. Tony's brain does a happy little cha-cha. He's practically overflowing with universal love, when the dragon promptly pukes yellowish goo all over his vintage Ramones T-shirt. Tony's brain shuffles itself down to a lonely old man mambo. The dragon blinks. It seems more curious than sick, adorable globs of projectile vomit notwithstanding. Tony takes a moment to reflect that finding that adorable is a Bad Sign, and carefully lifts the dragon out of the puddle and over to the pile of clean rags he keeps by the car motors.

"For the sake of harmony and cooperation between our peoples, I am not going to name you Pukey," Tony says, scraping at his shirt with a dirty towel rag. In response, the dragon hiccups and farts at the same time.

"You should try your best to uphold the dignity of dragonkind, like I do with human kinds of people-things," Tony says seriously. "This is like first contact you know, it's a big deal. You could get like two book deals out of it plus options, at minimum."

He wipes his hands on his jeans and waits to see if they swell up or turn into tentacles. They don't, and Tony absent-mindedly starts to put together an enclosure around the dragon so that it doesn't flop over and hurt itself. A couple of the robots roll themselves over and Tony sets down a firm look-no-touch policy before he lets them help with the construction.

"I didn't realize you were an egg, egg," Tony says. "I should get the superspies to ghostwrite it, they would do a bang-up job. You know Hawkeye and Widow are totally writing trashy thrillers on the side. I think Natasha will let me read her trilogy if I promise not to write any reviews on Amazon about it. Which I would _never_. Integrity."

Tony looks down. The dragon is curled up in a loose ball, its sides rising and falling gently in sleep.

"You're a dragon, imagine that," Tony says. His brain rebels only a little bit, grudgingly making room for mythical scaled creatures next to schemata of missiles and bombs and other machines. It livens up his lab even more, keeps the robots company. The dragon that Tony gets in the habit of calling Egg also develops a discerning palate for Chicago-style pizza and grows at an eye-boggling rate. He doesn't quite know why he hasn't told the other Avengers, even though they comprise the one group of people in the world who would consider the dragon as much of a possibility as Tony Stark just setting somebody up for a prank or having just gotten into some choice pharmacoepia. He does make an exception to get in touch with Bruce, who is being AWOL for a while but is still pal enough to field 3 A.M. calls about whether he's ever heard of a dragon dying of colic or not, helping Tony come up with infection models and vaccines for said dragon, little things like that.

"What have you been feeding it?" Bruce asks on one of the calls. His voice sounds scratchy through the layers of encryption.

"Raw steak, mostly," Tony answers. "And occasionally pizza."

"Looks healthy," Bruce comments.

"Okay, mostly pizza. Works for the Ninja Turtles, you have to admit."

"It doesn't seem to matter. Growth rate is pretty phenomenal," Bruce says. He pauses. "You probably can't keep it at your place for much longer."

"I got some land out west," Tony says, even though he automatically recoils against prospect of sending Egg away to enjoy nature and eat moose and whatever.

"You still haven't told anyone else?"

"Well, not the team, yet," Tony says. "Doesn't seem relevant."

"Nice for you to share your secret with me," Bruce dryly says.

"What, the guy who has a Ph.D. in big green monsters?"

Bruce's laugh buzzes over the line. "But seriously, don't skimp on the fiber and vitamins."

Tony salutes him and ends the call and orders a truckload of supplements over the internet. He still hasn't told the team, but he tells Rhodey because he doesn't want Egg being mistaken for a very creative drone, and because he knows that Rhodey knows that having a dragon is the coolest damn thing ever after the suit. Tony swears him to secrecy and Rhodey just rolls with it, because there is very little James R. Rhodes is surprised by when it comes to Tony at this point.

"How big do you think Egg will get?" Rhodey asks, coming over to discuss best-care practices for dragon wings one weekend.

"BB thinks maybe a couple of tons, at least?" Tony replies.

"You know what I'm thinking," Rhodey says.

Tony pats Egg on the shoulder. "What about it, mind showing flyboy here a good time?"

Egg just snuffles at Rhodey's jacket pockets, looking for pizza. Rhodey obligingly gives Egg's eye ridges a vigorous scratch.

"You're a beauty, baby," he tells the dragon. Egg basks in the attention.

"That's why you're my best friend," Tony says.

"I hope you have a helmet around here, though," Rhodey says.

And Tony tells Pepper, because he may be a genius, but making sure that another living, breathing being gets enough food and sleep at the right intervals is just not his forte. They discuss the mundane in the fantastic like they always do, like a business, this plan and that plan weighed on scales calibrated for benefit and cost and serendipity. The pros and cons of crystal litter versus reconstituted pine chips and industrial-grade materials for scratching posts and so on.

"And you've never had a cat?" Tony says, admiring the efficiency with which Pepper scolds Egg about chewing up the couch and then melts when Egg taps experimentally on the piano keys, all the while negotiating a deal with their Hong Kong subsidiary.

"I have you, Tony," Pepper says in a long-suffering voice, covering her phone with a hand. "That's like having three cubic meters of cats."

Tony doesn't plan on telling the rest of the team, although Nick Fury and his SHIELD compadres must know about a dragon hanging out around Stark Tower already—the unexplained delay in the (re)construction would have tipped them off for sure. No one says anything, but Bruce's assessment turns out to be right, unsurprisingly, and a few months after Tony finds the strange rock in the desert, he transports Egg in secret to a ranch he owns out in Montana, and promises that he'll visit as much as he can.

Work on the tower resumes and Tony has all the wacky funtimes he can handle with the Avengers, up to and including a battle involving a giant squid monster attacking the dockyards of New York, during which Tony only cracks a couple of terrible jokes, a feat of truly superheroic restraint, and both of them out of the earshot of civilians to boot. He's glad to find out that the ruckus hasn't too badly affected the undersea electrical work he's been expanding on for the past several months.

Steve calls for a head count when it's clear that they've pretty thoroughly sashimied the monster to death, and the guy is a little bit, how do you say, _intense_ about recycling and seems to regard mall food courts as the third circle of Hell, but Tony appreciates that he never shirks from taking charge of their ragtag group, even if he unfortunately doesn't seem like he'll ever really get the full brilliance of Tony's amazing jokes.

They huddle around, taking stock of the mess. The squid monster has made a ruin of even Thor's normally perfect hair. Tony sidles up to Natasha.

Natasha sighs. "I do not write internationally bestselling spy thrillers."

"I know like almost a _quarter_ of the literary agents in New York," Tony says. "I'm gonna find out and then do a reading and put it up on YouTube if you don't tell me."

"Frankly, I'm surprised you're not asking me where we keep the back issues of Maxim on the Helicarrier," she says.

"Burn," Clint says. "I write children's books by the way."

"I'm on to you and your transparent attempts at misdirection," Tony tells him. "And I read that entire In-N-Out menu by myself that one time, after we fought off those grasshopper monsters," he says to Natasha in protest.

"Cap, you should illustrate the next one," Clint says to Steve, who is headed towards them

"Are we still talking about this?" Steve says with a deep frown. "We're professionals and we ought to be—"

Steve being kind of a dick is interrupted by the sea-monster suddenly regenerating itself with a really gross sound, picking him up by the waist, and flinging him into the nearest building.

Tony hears Thor's shout and explosions from Clint's arrows with his own ears just before he shuts the faceplate of his suit closed and blasts off. He doesn't get far before he's knocked out of the air and crushed beneath a mass of squid monster. Jarvis speaks urgently to him as the suit cracks all around, when suddenly there's a rush of heat and a feeling like floating on clouds. His systems come back online at full power but Tony just sits, surrounded by a charred heap of squid, as Egg roars in from above, spitting white-hot fire from its mouth.

Egg makes short work of the monster, leaving the dock smelling like the inside of a broiler at a seafood restaurant. The dragon lands next to Tony, looking pleased. Egg blows a puff of steam at his head, and Tony lifts up his faceplate. The rest of the team makes their way towards them cautiously. Tony hears a groan behind him, and helps Steve out of the pile of rubble. Steve coughs and looks up.

"Oh," Steve breathes out. "It's a dragon."

He staggers to his feet, using his shield as leverage, and teeters towards Egg.

Tony pauses. "Uh. Captain. You're bleeding."

"It's okay," Steve says. He coos at the dragon. Tony finds this _really disturbing_.

"From the gut," Tony says, in case he hasn't noticed.

"It'll heal up," Steve says distractedly.

"You should have told us about it," Natasha says. She doesn't look either impressed _or_ interested in Egg until Steve starts fussing over the dragon, and Tony files this away for later—he could probably test his theory out with some cute cat videos beforehand. He's going to get the titles of those books, one way or another, preferably another, which will probably involve landing Steve and Egg a TV deal or a guest spot on Sesame Street at the very least.

Clint and Natasha both look charmed but keep a healthy distance, whereas Thor draws back ever so slightly. "I am not fond of scaled creatures," he says at Tony's raised eyebrow.

Steve turns to look at Thor with an expression that Tony can only classify as _TEAM IS OVER_. Tony hastily tries to redirect where this looks like it's going, flaming carriage and exploded tires and all.

"You just haven't met Egg yet," he says too loudly. "Egg is the bestest."

"No, I just do not care for them," Thor says.

"_But it's a dragon_," Steve says.

Great, Tony thinks. Team: Over. But Thor turns his attention to Egg and says, "It is not a question of principles—"

A light goes on in Tony's head. "Is Egg being telepathic with you?" he asks Thor, jealousy flaring up in his heart. "_Are you doing telepathic things together?_"

Thor seems to be unaware that Tony is talking at all, and the rest of the team looks on, nonplussed.

"I bought Egg five hundred acres of pristine arboreal real-estate in Montana and it doesn't telepathy with me," Tony grumbles.

"Probably because you never shut up," Natasha says blandly. "Thor, are you a telepath? Are Asgardians telepathic?" she asks.

"No, of course not," Thor says. "It is simply the All-Speak."

"So you are having conversation with the dragon telepathically using the All-Speak," Natasha says.

"It is not telepathy," Thor replies. "I am not conversing with it," he adds with a hint of discomfort.

Steve shakes his head. "Wait. What?"

Thor's brows knit together. "The All-Speak is a—" Thor searches for the right words, stumbling a little, "cognitive field scalar, that—" Thor halts in frustration. He waves Mjolnir in an arc and shakes his other hand in place. "—conciliate your central waveguide—because the dragon transmits along a telepathic mesial zel—as though the field was inverting just the essential bands to make alliterative axes but that is why..." he trails off unhappily at the utterly blank looks that everyone is giving him.

"It's like a satellite dish," Tony ventures.

Thor nods, relieved. "Yes, just so. Thank you."

"Well, I understood everything," Clint says. The monster squelches some more as the dragonfire continues cooking it into a blackened mess, reminding them that they still need to wrap things up; after helping the local fire crews with the clean up and touching base with SHIELD, they head to the tower.

Egg flies behind Tony to the roof, making the people on the ground gasp and point as they pass over the city. Egg is too big to fit inside the suite, but just right for lounging on the landing pad. Tony passes everyone cold drinks from the bar and between him and Natasha and Steve and Thor they probably chug a dozen gallons of rum and coke. Sometime during the conversation Steve goes out onto the balcony to coo over Egg some more. Tony takes a moment from a heated argument with Thor over man-made satellites and sees Steve teaching Egg to crush soda cans—he can see just Steve teaching Egg how to sort PET bottles into an excessive number of categories in the near future—but Tony thinks it should be okay, Steve will probably also end up producing staggeringly beautiful anatomical studies and bond with Rhodey and Bruce over dragon physiology.

Forget Sesame Street, Tony thinks. He should give Animal Planet a call.

"I don't think it's a good idea to have Cap self-treating his undiagnosed PTSD by getting mauled by a flying lizard of unknown origins," Natasha says.

"Could be worse," Clint says, looking amused. Cat videos, Tony reminds himself, and turns to Natasha.

"Are you going to put this in your next book?" he asks her, but Natasha says nothing, only takes another sip from her drink. Publishing industry insiders, he adds to his mental post-it and lets Clint ask Thor about his mild herpetophobia so that he can duck out onto the balcony and give Steve a blue recycling bin and Egg a well-deserved pat on the snout.

"Good job, buddy."

Egg pushes its nose into his chest and Tony throws an arm around the dragon's neck.

"Oh, okay," Tony says without protest. "And good job, me."

•••••


	7. 7 werewolves (natasha)

series a

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werewolves (natasha)

•••••

Memory of an old mission: The line of spruce shatters into tangled brush and clipped green grass on the mini-golf fairway snaked to look like the route her family's hearth-father took when once he followed a caravan to Odessa and back, the tale he told with rheumy eyes and dowsed with ague, but a different fever runs in the targets, revs on money sex booze, all kinds of beautiful, glittering, surface things. Mini-golf jetset friends laugh and drink champagne, joking about, what was it? creatures of the night no one believes in.

Or at best thinks that being one means howling at the moon on a cold dark night, forgetting that it is always in the sky and forgetting that there are eyes for whom the sun does not blaze more brightly. That might be the reason why the world always looks so strange from her vantage point but it doesn't matter when she is performing the ablution, skin sliding off her like naphtha.

Tinny kazoo sounds from out their mouths go up one octave, two octaves when her teeth breaks through the skin of their hands as though they're paper gloves. Main target had bought her a drink after cheating on four, didn't know that she'd noticed the funny incline of his hips, his roundabout desires. Bubbling out past his lips, warm like the fat piling up like soft crepe, her snout mitering up to scuttle his belly to let him sink and drown.

Rank footfalls on the grass signal, time to go, and then she's just another shadow fretted by gunfire. But a creature of the night?

Not at all. As soon as the next day she's a pretty belled cat or a bird in the hand or even a bird in a cage.

Some are nicer than others. This one finds someone else like her, not that they know. Mordant boysteeth on him and skin on top of skin, has got salt smell spritzed around him like a permanent halo. It itches, he confesses, wrinkling his nose. Reminds him of the time he once ran all the way to an inland sea, plunged into the water to swim under a mackinaw, chase fish in its shadow. Ran back home with pads worn bloody and hypothermic almost to death but triumphant, or so he relates, who can tell? Odd old-young thing. Believes that the moon will keep them and take their souls back, that's what his mother told him, he says with a shrug, then their fellows pass them by and then they fall silent because no one else would understand.

There was something like that passed around the stove on some nights, the ones engraved before her memory turns into a scratchy record. That there they'll wear nothing but themselves, will need nothing more than. No fangs, no claws, no fur, no skin. They'll run without a care for a body, a pure secret unto themselves, rid of human conveniences and human flesh.

•••••

Their friend is near to there, someone's careless scrimshaw on living bone whittled to one thought: kill; split into two thoughts: sleep and wake, ostinato over the thrum of his recoilless rifle, tap tap tap.

But he's still mazed somewhere within and their lives are enjambed, one after another, in the rough shape if not the exact configuration in which they began.

She'll catch his scent on him and he'll catch his scent on her and they'll have it out, here in the now, the reckoning that's to come.

•••••


	8. 8 girl (king)

series a

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•••••

•••••

girl (king)

•••••

They met, once.

Sneaking around in their own way, one to seek, the other to evade. She had run away from a lesson and was hiding in the library from her tiresome ladies-in-waiting and footmen, for no one would ever think of looking for her among books; she stifled a giggle at the cleverness of her plan and hurried deep into the stacks. It was not _her_ fault that she did not see the figure crouched behind a pile of books around a corner and went tumbling facedown into the flagstones. Just as gracelessly, she rushed to her feet, eyes smarting and anger boiling, to stare into the face of a _frost giant_, a tiny spindly one wrapped in a ragged cloak.

She yelled in surprise and the frost giant startled back from where it had been sitting, flinging the book it had been reading into the air. She barreled forward and tackled the frost giant, pinning it to the floor by the tome wedged between them.

"Surrender, intruder!" she shrieked.

With its long, narrow fingers wrapped around the edges of the leather cover, seemingly finding neither her weight nor the book's a burden, the frost giant blinked.

"Why?"

"Because you are my prisoner," she explained.

"And who are you to demand from me such a privilege?" the frost giant inquired.

"The Prince of Asgard!"

"But Odin has no son."

Her face scrunched into a frown. "It is my official title." When the frost giant made no reply, she muttered, "Mother says Father was certain that I would be a boy."

"I thought you were a boy," the puny frost giant said.

"You did!"

"Yes," the frost giant said, drawing back at her delighted exclamation.

"Haha!" she said, leaping back to jump on her feet, shaking her shorn hair all around until it was in even greater disarray. She looked at the frost giant with fondness. "I will march you to the nice dungeons."

"Oh," the frost giant said, heaving the book to one side and sitting up, "but a dungeon is no place for one such as me."

"Why not?" she demanded.

In response, the frost giant, becoming a shadowy mist, reappeared behind her as a plain, solemn girl, still clad in the drab cloak.

She whirled, eyes bulging. "You are an evil sorcerer!"

The other girl shrugged. "Mere tricks and little things," she said. She spun around once and then melted back into her previous form. "I am myself. See."

"Change into something else!"

The frost giant thought long and hard, and then shimmered into a boy about her age or somewhat older, skinny as could be with eyes that looked out from under a shock of dark hair.

"Something else!"

"That is all I can manage yet," the boy replied, pale-faced, drawing the cloak about him more tightly. He wore a sark of some rough material underneath and his feet were bare on the stones.

Her face fell. "Oh."

"I was only reading," the boy said, indicating a small, neat stack of books on the ground. He began putting them back on the shelves, lifting each volume up as gently as a babe. "Surely even in Asgard that is not a punishable offense?"

"Well, no."

"Well then."

"But in Asgard! Frost giants are _not allowed_," she said with an officious air.

"I am not a frost giant _now,_" the boy said, sliding the last book back into place.

At the face of this logic, a frown settled on her features.

"And you are not a warrior, and neither us met in combat."

"I am _going_ to be."

"You are not one at present," the boy meanly pointed out.

She deflated. "Everyone says that."

"Oh?"

"Aye, there is Father and Mother and the councilors. Even Sif," she answered, downcast. But in the next breath she brightened. "But she is always kind to me, and spars with me, and tells me that I will be a great warrior someday, like her."

"Sif is your elder?"

"Sif is like unto my sister," she said proudly. "If she can learn to fight then so may I! I will grow taller soon, and then I'll be the tallest of them all, and then I will bash everyone into smithereens with my sword and shield," she said with conviction. She only came up to Sif's elbow now, but she was sure of it. "Except for Sif, she will be my champion. And not Volstagg because he always shares his cakes. And not Hogun because it is he who tells the best jokes. Because he does not laugh! And not Fandral because he has promised to teach me to fence." She swung her arms and punched a shadow. "And then no more _embroidery_," she added with a hiss.

"Embroidery," the boy said to the crown of her head. It seemed to her that he only then noticed the grubby scrap of cloth clutched in her left hand. He looked upon it with something like pity before asking, "What of your sire and dam?"

She scoffed. "Of course I would not smash Father and Mother."

"And your people, who will surely look to you for guidance and protection?"

"They have nothing to fear. If they do as I say," she said smugly.

"You'll be a right tyrant," the boy said, nodding.

"What is that?" she asked suspiciously.

"Nature," the boy replied.

"What is yours?"

"Sometimes I see," the boy answered. "As now. But it is not well. Not my gift."

"What is?"

"To make others see."

"Is that not the same thing?" she asked. "Or are you not like others?"

The boy smiled craftily. "Not always."

She looked around at the shelves that towered above them, at all the books, and then at the boy, his bare feet, the cruel slant of his mouth, his clear eyes.

"Why did you come here?"

"I made a wish. To gaze upon the face of my enemy."

"Why?"

"I was curious."

"Why?"

"Because."

"Why?"

"Because it will be asked of me."

"Why?"

"To bring you death."

"Why?"

"Because it must be!" the boy exclaimed in exasperation. Then she understood, and the weight lifted from her brows.

"Ah, it is a thing foretold!" she said, nodding and stroking an invisible beard, imagining herself to be as wise as Odin and Frigga and Heimdall and the Norns, all the women and all the mothers. "Then that is that. But you must be sure to prove yourself worthy of dying in battle against me."

The boy looked at her strangely. Then he laughed. "Are you not a king's daughter?" he asked.

"By Yggdrasil's roots I am!" she blustered, thinking that his question hid a slight. She was not supposed to swear; Frigga would have boxed her ears for it. A thrill raced through her veins. "And that is no handicap," she said, parroting what Sif had said at the end of a fight, her nose bloodied and her knuckles too, standing contemptuously over a crying youth who had called her something very ugly, a word Sif had said that she may not ever brook, and she had agreed, nodding, eyes huge with fear and admiration. She was going to be as great a warrior as Sif, whom she loved with all her heart, though a selfish corner of that same heart harbored an ambition to be even greater. Guilt had no place there, not yet.

"Then will you be king after Odin?"

"If I am worthy, if I can lift Mjolnir," she answered. "And I _shall_."

"Yes, hm," the boy said. "But to rule is to die."

"In glorious battle," she prompted.

"In glorious battle," the boy echoed. His narrow shoulders lifted and dropped. "That is ever all there is, I suppose."

She nodded again; this was something she understood, too, that which was woven into the fabric of the entire world and gave it form and meaning, beginning and end. To her eyes, now the boy looked like a creature more familiar, and not because of his shape.

"What is your name?"

"I am called—" he began, and then paused as he changed his mind. "I will tell you when next we meet."

"Tell me now!"

"I think not."

"Now!" she demanded. "Or I will lop your head off!"

"With what, pray tell?" the boy asked, mocking.

She headbutted him, smack in the middle.

The boy's breath oofed out, dusting her neck with ice, and he crumpled into a heap. She looked down at him in triumph. When the boy did not seem to be getting back up, she gingerly felt around the top of her head, which had become very cold.

"Are you slain, just like that?" she asked with disappointment.

The boy rolled over a little to one side with a thoughtful look.

"It seems so, just like that," he told her. "I like you, funny little thing."

Her face flamed from the insult. "You—"

The boy laughed, the sound less nice this time. His gaze grew slightly unfocused and then his eyes found her face. "So let us find death elsewhere. Not meet again."

When his meaning reached her, she frowned. "Not ever?"

"Perhaps never." He sat up when he heard hurried footsteps approaching. "I fear I must take my leave of you, Prince of Asgard."

She had heard them as well, recognized all too well the patter of footmen's boots and slippers that shod ladies-in-waiting. If any of them caught the intruder, it would not go well for him, she was sure. Imperiously she waved a hand, lifting her chin. "You may go, I suppose."

He climbed to his feet with the help of the shelves and then disappeared from view without further ceremony, leaving her to marvel at where he had been. The arrival of her furious and worried retinue at nearly the same time scattered the last of the chill, and the fierce scoldings she received—and the sentencing of her royal person to yet more endless hours spent in courtly lessons—all but erased the meeting from her mind.

But not entirely, and it lived on, once, but whether as a match, or game, or indeed battle . . . an other time, another tale.

•••••


End file.
